node types with structured meta data
It would be nice to be able to define types of nodes with associated properties. For example, maybe an "event" type node with properties such as "name of event", date, duration, etc. I could also envision a "person" type node with name, birth place, birth date, etc. Yet another example could be a "research" type node with the name of the research paper, lead author's name, university affiliation, date published, names of other collaborators.
An example of a structured node that is buried in the text is at http://forums.thebrain.com/tool/post/thebrain/vpost?id=2733306
I imagine that the structured data structures would be relational and this would facilitate logical data-base oriented queries beyond tagging. For example, find all research papers published between 2001 and 2002. Find all research papers with "cognition" in the title and "Jones" as lead author.
Find all people born in a certain state during a certain time.
I am thinking about the query capability to make it easier to do more interesting investigations (especially for users who may not have created the brain)
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vlad1 commented
I think I have worked out a neat way to implement structured metadata. Have a look at my suggestion http://thebrain.uservoice.com/pages/general/suggestions/107028-thought-groups
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vlad1 commented
If we had such a feature, then we could do things like present a list of 'bug' thoughts (referring to the previous example) in various colours, such as red for critical bugs, amber for serious, etc.
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vlad1 commented
When looking at a list of bugs, it is far better to present the list in order of priority rather than title of bug etc. In this case, we could assign a 'priority' attribute to the bugs, and then specify that we want the bug thoughts sorted by this attribute. Come to think of it, wouldn't it be cool to specify that thoughts with a particular attribute value have a certain colour.
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vlad1 commented
I'll give another example of how sorting by an attribute (rather than by name, last active date etc.) could be very useful. Say we had a thought that had as children a whole bunch of bug reports (e.g. hyperlinks to Mantis items, GNATS items etc.).
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vlad1 commented
Absolutely in support of node types with structured meta data ! I would also like to remind everyone of the related good suggestion made by LukeP, about permitting control over the sort order of thoughts. In 70157-please-bring-back-user-defined-sort-order-in-plex, LukeP suggests that it would be nice to have the option of nominating a particular attribute to sort by.
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nighthawk commented
think of the use in uml modeling
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LukeP commented
Another option would be to make the tags 'typed'. E.g. I could define a tag as type 'date', another tag as type 'number within this range'.
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LukeP commented
Harlan,
Any hope of seeing an implementation of this in 5.0? Along with ability to arrange by and search on such data, it would help to address many other requests that are open.
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IAMNapoleon commented
Yes, structured meta data would be very useful.
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LukeP commented
and arrange nodes as per attributes and you have extremely powerful system. In fact you could bring all existing functionality to the custom attribute system by locked attributes, e.g. list of tags, node color, list of children, suddenly combined with modular search there are no limits.
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LukeP commented
Thing about what could be accomplished with this combined with http://thebrain.uservoice.com/pages/general/suggestions/80419.
you could define custom attributes that are typed which would dictate search options. E.g. if you add custom attribute 'date' then in search you can now add a sub-search (AND) and say date + (is less than, is greater than, is equal) + date. -
LukeP commented
Absolutely! This along with exposed and modularized search could make the software soo powerful and provide a nice blend between rational db and graphs.
Harlam, PB must already have an internal attribute system, e.g. to store node color, links to children, time created, etc... any hope of exposing this in 5.0? Then the ability to filter and report on the attributes would be the next step -
HanBav commented
yes! including the proposals of twospoons and Net77
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Net77 commented
That would be a great extension. From my point of view the usage of custom attributes with would extend the possibilities quite a lot. Here it should be discussed also, of differnet types (string, numer, date, etc) should be possible for custome attributes. It would be also nice, if the values for such attrubutes could be either entered manually or selected from a predefined list.
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twospoons commented
As an extension of this, I could see custom attributes as something that the user could select when setting up a new thought type and specifying these attributes as required/optional fields for all thoughts of that type.
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twospoons commented
This could easily be achieved with the ability to create custom attributes for thoughts/links. Hopefully that is what you are asking for and not a set of predefined types/properties. Being able to create a custom attribute for a thought and then populate it's value would be very helpful.
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dr_ahlstedt commented
Yes! Very good feature request if you're able to create these own nodes too. Like, I want on for "country", and then "history of that country" and "economy", etc.