The Business of Understanding

"The ways of organizing information are finite. It can only be organized by location, alphabet, time, category, or hierarchy. "

thoughts on this thought? I was re-acquainted with ti recently, and category/hierarchy bothered me. i think i should prefer category/attributes....

Which of the five LATCH cubbyholes would hold a connected network that was not a hierarchy? There are even some commercial products that give you this capability, of organizing by connectedness. So, add a G-for-graph onto the beginning of LATCH.

Then I think alphabet is a little bit too specific also. What about in-sequence by number or id as well as letter? Change the A to I and we have something a lot easier to remember -- GLITCH

Nice article. Perhaps Hierarchy should be relationship.

You can create a hierarchy of relationships, you can create a hierarchy out of a connected graph, and you can create a hierarchy out of categories (categories are a hierarchy, no?). The word hirerarchy in this context seems to me to say that there are three "fixed" ways of organizing information, and two which can expand to be whatever you want them to be.

It seems to me after reading Richard Wurmans article that he used the term hierarchy to mean an ordered list. He uses the following definition: "This mode organizes items by magnitude from small to large, least expensive to most expensive, by order of importance, etc.". What I mean is he is not talking about classifying things according to categories and subcategories.

I have yet to be convinced that there are only 5 ways to organize information but I´m open to the idea. It would be interesting to here Richards comments on the criticism above. What about an interconnected graph e.g. I guess you can argue that this mode of organization is very seldom used in printed media and doesn´t lend itself very well if one wants to find something particular in a large set of objects.

see you again sometime..

Great site, well done. I enjoy beeing here and i´ll come back soon. You do a great job. Many greetings.

*Name:


*Email Address:


URL:


Remember me?

Comments:



posting can be slow; please wait a few seconds before hitting the button again.

mail entry to a friend