A Proposal on Organization of Information System

1. Introduction

We are living in an age of information, but sometimes information imposes more burden than benefit. From a user’s view, most information systems including file systems, mail systems and various menu-based systems are essentially organized in hierarchical structure. As information increases, yet the usability of the sytems decreases. The major flaw of this kind of structure is that it only provides a single path to the target information. If a user misses one corner, he will possibly lose his way. This situation could be improved if an information system supports multipath routing. Aiming at this, this article proposes a practical solution by borrowing some ideas from Gmail system.

2. Information retrieval problem

Information itself is great, but storing and retrieving information sucks. Day by day, a typical computer user browses and saves web pages, collects favorite bookmarks and RSS, downloads files from BT or emule, composes and receives email, writes documents or programs etc. He enjoys all of these until someday, he finds himself gradually suffering information overload. As an evidence, he now and then feels a little bit dizzy: his desktop is terribly messy with miscellaneous icons packed like sardines, his bookmark menu pulls all the way down like a huge blanket and his inbox is cluttered with mails like a bulging bag. He comes to realize that if this situation cannot be changed, his brains must explode before his hard disk or mailbox does. Thereafter, He cultivates the habit of organizing files, bookmarks and mails into hierarchical folders. As a result, things improve a lot. Unfortunately, good times don't last long. He finds that as his documents grow rapidly, his folders become more and more, deeper and deeper. It takes some time for him to save a document to appropriate position, and it does even more time to find a document he downloads or composes. He tends to get tired, vexed and somewhat lost when he navigates the hierarchical trees. He knows he possesses a gigantic Christmas tree with tremendous gifts hanging on, but few of them are handy. Time and time again, he fails to find an important document after exhaustive search. He doubts his memory, and occasionally, he doubts machine's memory. Although he knows those missing stuffs will never automatically jump upon to him, he still cannot help yelling at the machine: where the hell are the damn documents hiding? From time to time, he slips back to the old habit: saving all recent files to desktop, just for better convenience and confidence. So, what is the root of the plague?

3. Gmail's solution

It turns out that the evil root is the traditional manner of information organization, namely, tree (or forest) structure. This hierarchical structure is reasonable for large but not huge quantities of information items. As the information volume swells, the tree structure becomes unmanageable little by little. The item lists in many folders are inevitably long and some folders are deeply nested. In file systems, this symptom can be alleviated to some degree by creating shortcuts in Windows or symbolic links in Unix-family OS. But that is not a final cure. As an interesting alternative, Google's Gmail presents what they call "label". A label is basically a tag which could be applied to a message together with other ones. Many users complain about it at the beginning because they are used to old folder fashion. But the complaints are waning as the time passes by. The users find that their messages are no longer like guerilla hiding in deep forest, instead, they are like regular army in one-line arrangement waiting for inspection. The most recent messages are on the top to access, which is impossible in the well-organized folder system; they won't be bewildered where to sort the messages since they can apply as many labels as they'd like to the messages; finding a specific message is easy too: users can filter by user-defined labels, or system-defined labels like inbox, sent, star, chat, trash etc. They can also search by sender, receiver, subject and message content. Even better, users can define filters that automatically apply labels to the incoming mails. This solution, henceforth we call tag structure, is not necessarily limited to mail management system, it should apply well to file system and other information systems such as knowledge management system.

4. Our solution

However, tag structure doesn't always suffice for our needs. Even though tags are much fewer than information items, they still can overflow. In Gmail's tag structure, all user-defined labels are independent and equal, but as a matter of fact, they are very likely different in their importance, urgency, popularity; some labels have inherent relation; the labels for a given information item vary in correlation. For example, labels like "work" or "family" are more important; labels like "todo" or "exam" are more urgent; labels like "sports" or “film” are more popular if the user is a sports or film fan. It's also desirable that after a programmer user labels some materials as "Java" or "C++", those materials can be automatically labeled as "programming language" and “OOP” such that he can later get all programming language-related items or OOP items in one list. Lastly, among all labels for a given information item, one may be more correlative than the others. Taking all of these into consideration, we propose a feasible solution as follows.

• Introduce hierarchical structure into tag structure. That is, we treat tags/labels as metadata of information, and organize them in the traditional tree structure. This way we combine two worlds' best parts together. Actually, we can go further. As we know, hierarchical tree structure is a directed tree in graph theory, but we may generalize the tag structure to digraph as long as it makes sense. This will allow a tag have more than one parents, something like multiple inheritance in some OOP languages. Obviously the gmail's tag structure is a special case of our structure when all labels are the roots(i.e. those having no sublabels).
• Introduce weight of importance, emergency and popularity for each tag so that tags are sortable by any of these respects. Gmail's star label can serve as this purpose, but it's too coarse-grained. The popularity weight of a tag can be chosen to be auto-incremented by each visit of the tag, which ensures the most frequently used tags are always on the top. Besides, tags can be sorted by most recent visited time. Consequently, users will have more confidence that documents they really care are available to fetch, and accessing any interesting, active and important items in the system is just a piece of cake.
• Introduce main label, i.e. one of an item's labels can be specified as the main label. In this sense, the traditional tree structure can be viewed as a special case of our structure: any folder name is exactly a label name (There is one subtle difference, though: unlike label names, same folder names in different path wouldn't clash). If the main label's correlativity is 1, other labels' should be between 0 and 1. This provides extra search and sort criteria.
• Introduce alias tag. Tags are allowed to have more than one names, these names can be abbreviations, synonyms, or even in different languages. Furthermore, alias can be more powerful: users may define a label as the logical combination of existing labels. For example, one can define "myPrograms" as "'my documents' and 'programs'", define "entertainment" as "sports or novel or movie" etc.
• Introduce thread. Users can create thread that link related message items. Gmail has conversation, but it doesn't allow users to union mails by themselves. The thread is good for follow-ups and different document revisions. This aggregation makes information system more compact and coherent.

5. Conclusion

To locate an information item, users need click folders to expand in a hierarchical system, while they need click labels to filter in a tag system. We don't mention search because search is slow and information content may be in binary form. The tag structure is conceivably a better solution, but it still has shortcomings. To further facilitate information retrieval, we've proposed a weighted diagraph tag structure, which is an improved tag structure integrating advantages of tree structure. An information system featuring this structure should be more accessible and enjoyable, and its users could be like pisciculturists, no matter how many fishes they have thrown into the ponds, any fish they desire will swim to them with waggly tail upon a single whistle.