# Organizing information

## Contents

## Writings

- ["As We May Think"](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/), Vannevar Bush (1945)
- ["UpLib: A Universal Personal Digital Library System"](https://web.archive.org/web/20060318230056/http://www2.parc.com/isl/members/janssen/pubs/TR-03-16.pdf), William C. Janssen and Kris Popat (2003)
- ["Designing better file organization around tags, not hierarchies"](https://www.nayuki.io/page/designing-better-file-organization-around-tags-not-hierarchies), Nayuki (2017)
- ["Prefer associative ontologies to hierarchical taxonomies"](https://notes.andymatuschak.org/z29hLZHiVt7W2uss2uMpSZquAX5T6vaeSF6Cy), Andy Matuschak (2020)
- ["Spatial Software"](https://darkblueheaven.com/spatialsoftware/), John Palmer (2020)

### Ted Nelson

- ["A File Structure for the Complex, the Changing, and the Indeterminate"](https://archive.org/details/nelson-file-structure/mode/1up) (1965)
- ["Xanalogical Structure, Needed Now More than Ever: Parallel Documents, Deep Links to Content, Deep Versioning, and Deep Re-Use"](http://cs.brown.edu/memex/ACM_HypertextTestbed/papers/60.html) (1999)
- ["A Cosmology for a Different Computer Universe: Data Model, Mechanisms, Virtual Machine and Visualization Infrastructure"](https://journals.tdl.org/jodi/index.php/jodi/article/view/131/129) (2004)
- ["A Graph-Theoretic Introduction to Ted Nelson's Zzstructures"](http://www.dgp.utoronto.ca/~mjmcguff/research/zigzag/), Michael J. McGuffin (2004)


## Software for organizing information

### Associative

- [Athens](https://github.com/athensresearch/athens)---an open source, local-first Roam Research clone
- [Foam](https://github.com/foambubble/foam)---an open source Roam Research clone as a Visual Studio Code extension
- [Roam](https://roamresearch.com/)---"As powerful as a graph database." SaaS.
- [Org-roam](https://github.com/jethrokuan/org-roam)---"Rudimentary Roam replica with Org-mode"

### Spatial

- [Nototo](https://www.nototo.app/)

### Tag-based

- Boorus. Oriented towards media, not text. There are many. Every booru I have seen identifies files by their checksum, usually MD5. It may be better instead to identify them by a [perceptual hash](!W).
- [Hydrus](https://github.com/hydrusnetwork/hydrus)---a cross-platform desktop booru with optional server-based collaboration. Stores tags in a database.
- [Tabbles](https://tabbles.net/)---a desktop and Web-based document manager with optional server-based collaboration. Windows-only. Allows chat-like comments on files. Stores tags in a database. Proprietary.
- [TagSpaces](https://www.tagspaces.org/)---a cross-platform desktop document manager. Stores tags in filenames or [sidecar files](!W "Sidecar file").
- [TMSU](https://tmsu.org/)---a cross-platform command line tool for tagging files. Can expose a virtual filesystem for accessing files by tag. Stores tags in a database.
- [AlternativeTo: "Apps tagged with 'tag-based-file-management'"](https://alternativeto.net/tag/tag-based-file-management/)


## See also

- [Databases](/databases)
- [Information retrieval](!W)
- [My directory layout](/setup#directory-layout) for personal data
- [Tags should take arguments](/tags-with-arguments)

## Page metadata

URL: <https://dbohdan.com/organizing-information.md>

Published 2020-04-17, updated 2024-02-18.

Tags:

- bookmarks
- data
- information retrieval
- tools