What's so special about hierarchies?

• BrowserDesign^?
• http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html

In a faceted system, what are the most important facets?

The Kind attribute of an item is fundamentally different from all other atttributes. It's the difference between what an item is about, what characteristics it possesses, what state of being it is in and what an item is.

Johannes is a human being is fundamentally different from Johannes has blue eyes or Johannes is German.

Another way to think about it is that Kind values are nouns, whereas values of all other attributes are adjectives. However, any attribute can have values expressed as a proper noun. Which means that many attributes can become Kinds.

Johannes is a German.

Cyan is a Blue.

As a result, you could elevate any attribute to become a Kind attribute.

Another difference between Kind attributes and all other attributes is that the Kind attribute value determines what other attributes an item may have. This is known as the Kind schema.

A human being has height, weight, race, sex, age, hair color, eye color, birth date, favorite kind of cookie.

Therefore groupings of items based on the Kind attribute are also fundamentally different.

The question to answer is: Why is Kind so important to people?

They represent Action modes:

• Communicating: I need to tell something to someone. I need to get information from someone.
• Task management
• Scheduling
• Sitting down to write a document or put together a presentation
• And then there is information that simply sits around for reference, which needs to be organized and catalogued: Media and Directories.

Why is it important to think of Media and Directory items separately?

Use Cases

• Starting out with Kind
• Schedule a single event or a series of events across several calendars (ie. planning a family vacation)
• Manage tasklists for two interdependent projects
• Put together a party photo album to send around to party guests
• Looking up a contact

• Starting out with a collection
• Planning a project
• Keeping on top of things minute-to-minute
• Need to bring up all the stuff related to a particular person for a 1-on-1 meeting

Why do the semantics of the sidebar collections need to be clear

• User needs to know what things they should make collections for