The Knowledge Organization

the weakness of hierarchical systems is that knowledge remains siloed from other ideas that could spark interesting connections. Adding a network to our file systems can help us preserve the benefits of hierarchy, while  infusing  it with cross-connections and associations.

Despite the popularity of networks in the Information Age, the hierarchy persists as a simple, consistent way to organize knowledge.

Numerous studies (Bergman et al. 2008; Fitchett and Cockburn 2015; Teevan et al. 2004) have found that people strongly prefer to navigate their file systems manually, scanning for the file they’re looking for, as oppos

Current solutions also lack interconnectivity. Many files are divorced from context; cast into a drawer, rather than methodically fitted into a broader framework of knowledge. Knowledge trees can create pseudo-relationships between files nested within a given hierarchy, but these are not explicit, and can only describe a vertical ‘parent and child’