going beyond limits of parent/child links

[igoldsmid]

Or, the "Semantic Web" for UltraRecall,
Or, going way beyond "Tree Clutter":

I am using UR as my primary information management application. I have experimented a lot with other ones, especially those that enable great flexibility in many to many linking between objects/Items - where the links can be custom defined according to users desired meanings. AND then all the linkages between all the objects/Items can be represented graphically in a network diagram.

as in: http://www.connectedtext.com/screenshots2.html

For example:

Item1 (person) is an employee of Item 2 (company)
Item 2 (company) is a subsidiary Item 3 (company)

Person 1 is work colleague of Person 2
Person 2 is connected via xyz property to Person 3

etc etc.

Thus there can as many custom defined links as one wishes.. and then any two Items can be linked with any number of different link types/values... ultimately a complex network of linkages will arise between all Items in the database.

Now of course at an extremely basic level this can easily be achieved using attributes for each link type - and the values of the attributes would be one or more other Items. But that wouldn't work come to think of it because UR doesn't presently store values of user defined attributes as clickable links. And even if it did, finding the "backlinks" from Items that are declared as values in other Items' relationship Attributes makes the whole idea rather messy and probably unworkable?

However, the real power will be where you can easily see relationships between Items that are more distant than those just one step away - and not just parent or child.

In a sense this is one of the key benefits being talked about in the "Semantic Web". In other words, the ability to generate new knowledge, or uncover hidden knowledge by seeing relationships between things that were not previously visible.

So what I am thinking here and asking co-users of UR, and Kinook to consider:

1.Creating a new mechanism for linking Items to Items via an unlimited number of custom definable link types
2. Not representing these links of course in the tree - but adding a network visualization component to UR to see all of "it" - for example see:

http://www.connectedtext.com/screenshots2.html

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/

Make sense?

Anyone else think this is cool? Important? Highly Desirable? Etc..

IJG