The first order of object arrangement is by sorting entities in aggregates of primary interest. The second order is to create a metadata of this arrangement. This is the prevalent practice, and we see it all around us…shopping malls, libraries, warehouses etc. But when it comes to information sorting there are differences between the way these are sorted vis-à-vis sorting of physical entities. Physical objects can be present at only one location at a time. This limitation has bound the methods of aggregation for such objects. But information, on the other hand, can be present at many places simultaneously. So, there is no need of neat trees or topological sorts. We can have trees with cobwebs connecting the many branches and leaves.
The concept is to free the information from the shackles of a particular arrangement scheme and let the users decide the way they want the information to be ordered to suite themselves. I get the same feeling when I need to know about a particular movie. In this case, I prefer yahoo movie’s user community based feedback mechanism to google’s page ranking algorithm. One gets a feel of “human touch”, which is missing when googleoids swarm the web searching for information.
Plz visit “Universal Biological Indexer and Organizer” www.ubio.org for an appreciation of the problem domain.
