Knowledge is Not a Tree
May 7, 2015 9:30 AM Subscribe
Piggydb and Oinker.me: Non-hierarchical information tools from Japanese designer Daisuke Morita.
Piggydb is a Java-based open-source personal knowledge manager, similar to a wiki. However, entries in Piggydb are connected with a network structure rather than a tree structure. So, the topic "Snake" could be filed simultaneously under "Reptiles," but also under "Biblical Symbols" and under "Hopi Clans." In large body of collected knowledge, surprising connections may begin to appear across diverse subjects and clippings.
Morita explains the benefits of Piggydb for stream-of-consciousness notetaking and free association and shows examples of it in action for working with literature. Or, read the documentation, written in Piggydb itself.
Morita's new project, Oinker.me (in early open beta) is simpler and more socially-oriented. Users may add and connect ideas on a kanban-like visual collaborative board.
Piggydb is a Java-based open-source personal knowledge manager, similar to a wiki. However, entries in Piggydb are connected with a network structure rather than a tree structure. So, the topic "Snake" could be filed simultaneously under "Reptiles," but also under "Biblical Symbols" and under "Hopi Clans." In large body of collected knowledge, surprising connections may begin to appear across diverse subjects and clippings.
Morita explains the benefits of Piggydb for stream-of-consciousness notetaking and free association and shows examples of it in action for working with literature. Or, read the documentation, written in Piggydb itself.
Morita's new project, Oinker.me (in early open beta) is simpler and more socially-oriented. Users may add and connect ideas on a kanban-like visual collaborative board.
This seems quite interesting. My favorite part of programming was back end stuff like data structures so it is nifty to see a different take on them than I learned.
posted by sotonohito at 10:55 AM on May 7, 2015
posted by sotonohito at 10:55 AM on May 7, 2015
Wait. So... oinker is wave reborn in a smaller more elegant mode?
posted by symbioid at 10:56 AM on May 7, 2015
posted by symbioid at 10:56 AM on May 7, 2015
Oh! It looks like this link he gave to Stock and flow is right up my alley with concepts in how the network is working/worked... Definitely relevant to how the net's evolved and some of the topics I've pondered through the years since FB's ascendancy (with G+ adapting the "Stream"/Flow model (where I had hoped they'd adopt the LJ/Bloggy format of "Stock")
posted by symbioid at 10:59 AM on May 7, 2015 [3 favorites]
posted by symbioid at 10:59 AM on May 7, 2015 [3 favorites]
Thanks for that Stock and Flow link, symbioid. Really thought provoking.
posted by overeducated_alligator at 11:22 AM on May 7, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by overeducated_alligator at 11:22 AM on May 7, 2015 [1 favorite]
PiggyDB is exactly what I've been looking for. I love you for bringing it to my attention!
posted by Monochrome at 1:39 PM on May 7, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by Monochrome at 1:39 PM on May 7, 2015 [1 favorite]
Oh man. I think I've been looking for this for a long time.
I've been using mind maps to keep track of information for years. The problem is that they become unwieldy if they get too large, and there are a lot of pieces of information that can apply to multiple branches. So I end up reorganizing, splitting, or linking to different branches a lot, and at this moment have 6 different maps I actively use in FreeMind.
I'm going to try this out over the weekend, but I think Piggydb might be the solution that helps me organize all of this information more efficiently. I'm pretty excited at the possibility.
posted by KGMoney at 5:37 PM on May 7, 2015 [1 favorite]
I've been using mind maps to keep track of information for years. The problem is that they become unwieldy if they get too large, and there are a lot of pieces of information that can apply to multiple branches. So I end up reorganizing, splitting, or linking to different branches a lot, and at this moment have 6 different maps I actively use in FreeMind.
I'm going to try this out over the weekend, but I think Piggydb might be the solution that helps me organize all of this information more efficiently. I'm pretty excited at the possibility.
posted by KGMoney at 5:37 PM on May 7, 2015 [1 favorite]
And now that I've thought about it a bit, that Stock and Flow link solidifies some other thoughts I had while reading Shane Snow's "Smartcuts" recently.
If you haven't read it, it's an interesting book about how some people manage to take smart shortcuts to "Accelerate success". It has some interesting ideas and examples, but tends to work from hindsight bias a little too much. He had a really good example in what he calls "Momentum": Michelle Phan starts posting makeup tutorials to YouTube. She gathers a small but devoted following, so she keeps doing it. A couple of years later, she does a video on Lady Gaga's makeup for "Bad Romance", and it goes viral. Millions of people subscribe to her channel overnight, and now she makes a living off of doing these tutorials.
The problem I noticed with the way Snow portrayed it was that he focused more on the lucky viral video, the Flow, than the years worth of videos she had already produced that people decided to stick around for. The Stock. I hadn't been able to put words to the problem I saw in the book until now.
posted by KGMoney at 6:26 PM on May 7, 2015 [1 favorite]
If you haven't read it, it's an interesting book about how some people manage to take smart shortcuts to "Accelerate success". It has some interesting ideas and examples, but tends to work from hindsight bias a little too much. He had a really good example in what he calls "Momentum": Michelle Phan starts posting makeup tutorials to YouTube. She gathers a small but devoted following, so she keeps doing it. A couple of years later, she does a video on Lady Gaga's makeup for "Bad Romance", and it goes viral. Millions of people subscribe to her channel overnight, and now she makes a living off of doing these tutorials.
The problem I noticed with the way Snow portrayed it was that he focused more on the lucky viral video, the Flow, than the years worth of videos she had already produced that people decided to stick around for. The Stock. I hadn't been able to put words to the problem I saw in the book until now.
posted by KGMoney at 6:26 PM on May 7, 2015 [1 favorite]
So I downloaded piggydb (Win 7) and I get a JNI error :( Anybody have any ideas? I checked and I have Java 8, so it should be fine (said it requires 1.6, which I think is... 6? I know Java has weird numbering schemes).
posted by symbioid at 6:30 PM on May 7, 2015
posted by symbioid at 6:30 PM on May 7, 2015
And, a long term goal of mine (if I don't die first) is to create this system I call the Ontonomicon (or Ontonomizer... I was going to call the the Ontographer, but someone else made a system with that name). If anyone is curious, I've got a couple pages on my wiki (mostly brainstorming/planning right now), here.
Ontonom(izer/icon) is more monolithic than these tools, and the approach is much more structured. The goal is a "world building tool" with relationships between entities in space and time, along with events. Ideally, one could make an educational historical tool to show things like the arc of history over time in Europe, or perhaps wars and battles, or really anything that can be placed in the world over time and convey relationships between entities. Graph theory is a big part of this (as well as ontology/taxonomy), and why this project of his interests me. Graph databases in general are also very interesting to me in this regards, though they're more for the backend of things, so end users probably wouldn't use them as much.
posted by symbioid at 6:54 PM on May 7, 2015 [2 favorites]
Ontonom(izer/icon) is more monolithic than these tools, and the approach is much more structured. The goal is a "world building tool" with relationships between entities in space and time, along with events. Ideally, one could make an educational historical tool to show things like the arc of history over time in Europe, or perhaps wars and battles, or really anything that can be placed in the world over time and convey relationships between entities. Graph theory is a big part of this (as well as ontology/taxonomy), and why this project of his interests me. Graph databases in general are also very interesting to me in this regards, though they're more for the backend of things, so end users probably wouldn't use them as much.
posted by symbioid at 6:54 PM on May 7, 2015 [2 favorites]
symbioid, do you have the 32- or 64- bit version of Java? I have vague memories of needing to get the 32-bit version, even though I was running 64-bit Win 7 to run certain Java programs. JNI is the Java Native Interface (java directly calling native code), so that seems like the kind of error you'd get with that mis-match. (I think you can have multiple versions of java installed in parallel but it can be a bit messy. Good luck.)
posted by benito.strauss at 7:57 PM on May 7, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by benito.strauss at 7:57 PM on May 7, 2015 [1 favorite]
What ended up happening was that I had dragged the app out of the folder it was in (thinking it'd create a short cut). I threw it back in the folder and it works fine now :) Thanks!
posted by symbioid at 8:27 PM on May 7, 2015
posted by symbioid at 8:27 PM on May 7, 2015
Can anyone give me a few examples of how you might use Oinker?
It looks potentially useful I think but I'm not sure I'm quite getting it.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 2:55 AM on May 8, 2015 [1 favorite]
It looks potentially useful I think but I'm not sure I'm quite getting it.
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 2:55 AM on May 8, 2015 [1 favorite]
Take a look at these examples:
http://piggydb.net/category/letsplay/
One of the other things I just discovered is that Piggydb auto-links words in your text that match existing tags. Thus you can see tag connections without having to remember what tags you have. This is something that has always driven me crazy about tag-based organization systems: it's on the user to remember every tag.
posted by overeducated_alligator at 6:57 AM on May 8, 2015 [4 favorites]
http://piggydb.net/category/letsplay/
One of the other things I just discovered is that Piggydb auto-links words in your text that match existing tags. Thus you can see tag connections without having to remember what tags you have. This is something that has always driven me crazy about tag-based organization systems: it's on the user to remember every tag.
posted by overeducated_alligator at 6:57 AM on May 8, 2015 [4 favorites]
Thanks, that's really useful. It was Oinker I was looking at, presumably it's basically the same but an implementation of these ideas?
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 8:05 AM on May 8, 2015
posted by Just this guy, y'know at 8:05 AM on May 8, 2015
Whoops, sorry, brainfart. Here is an example of Oinker used for a kanban.
posted by overeducated_alligator at 8:14 AM on May 8, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by overeducated_alligator at 8:14 AM on May 8, 2015 [1 favorite]
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I wonder if it uses a graph database as the backend or how it works. Speaking of Trees and data organization. One tool I downloaded, but never gave a fair shake was treesheets which was a sort of tree-based spreadsheet.
Hypertextual links like this is what I thought the internet was going to be about... Yay for people working on cool new ways to organize data/information.
posted by symbioid at 10:44 AM on May 7, 2015 [2 favorites]