3 Apr 2007 14:28
Semantic awareness?
You see, I've been using Tomboy a lot lately. And wonderful as it is, there is a big, big downside about it: links to existing notes are only created when the entered text is exactly like the note's name, that is: if one of my notes is called "school" any notes containing the word "school" will link to it, but not notes containing the word "schools". This detracts from the program's usefulness, so I would like to know: Is there a way to make tomboy semantically aware, that is to make it treat "house" and "houses" as the same word instead of two separate, unrelated entities?
Tomboy does implicit linking. Implicit linking is bad. It may look
easier at first, but as your note collection grows you accumulate too
many links. Your notes become a mess. It actually decreases the
usability of links.
Take a look at wikipedia, they use links very carefully.
With tomboy I try to make note titles as long as possible to avoid
problems. I should have done this from the start, now i'm really afraid
to rename some notes:
In the previous example, if the author someday goes to another school,
he may decide to rename the note 'school' to 'Old School'. Tomboy will
then happily replace the word 'school' in every notes body with the new
title.
I'd prefer explicit linking anytime. And I would prefer unique
identifiers with labels, as title, over links relying purely on the note
title.
cheers
Mario
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