Classification Basics

<h2>Classification Tools in TheBrain</h2>

<p>Eventually, after using TheBrain for a period of time you are going to want to group information together somehow.</p>

<p>

Depending on how much information is in your database, and how you want to be able to retrieve the information (or filter out other information), your system may be complex, or fairly simple.

Here are the tools for classifying your thoughts:

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<ul>

<li>Thoughts - Parent, Jump and Child. Your main system is going to be how you link thoughts and how they are grouped. Think of it as a filing system. The very fact that you have grouped some files in folder means they have been classified somehow. In TheBrain, the ability to have multiple parent thoughts, and jump thoughts gives you the option of multiple ways to group/classify your thoughts.</li>

<li><a href="http://groups.google.com/group/personalbrain-users/web/types-and-supertypes" rel="nofollow">Type</a>s - Only one classification available per thought.</li>

<li><a href="http://groups.google.com/group/personalbrain-users/web/tags" rel="nofollow">Tags</a> - Multiple per thought</li>

<li>Link Types - Ways of showing relationships to other thoughts</li>

</ul>

<p>There are multiple ways to classify information in your brain, depending on the information you are trying to classify, how you want to show your information, and how you want to find your information.</p>

<p>

No matter how simple or complex the solution you decide upon, the goal is always how to easily find what you are looking for, and any related information that's useful. 

Here are the tools for getting at that information:</p>

<ul>

<li>Instant Search</li>

<li><a href="http://groups.google.com/group/personalbrain-users/web/advanced-searching" rel="nofollow">Extended Search</a></li>

<li><a href="http://groups.google.com/group/personalbrain-users/web/advanced-searching" rel="nofollow">Advanced Search</a></li>

<li>Reports</li>

<li>The Calendar</li>

</ul>

<p>When building a system you want to craft it based on the easiest/quickest way of finding information, to the slower and more complex.</p>

<ol>

<li>Plex (Fast to Medium) - Primarily use is browsing and viewing the thought and information related to that thought, as well as related information. The classification used here is based on relationships (links).</li>

<li>Instant Search (Fast) - The quickest way to find information, the classification system used here is based on the thought name. Don't forget the <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/personalbrain-users/web/the-comma-trick" rel="nofollow">comma trick</a> for this system.</li>

<li>Calendar (Fast) - Limited classification based on date/time. This allows you to group thoughts by when you need them.</li>

<li>Tags (Fast to Complex)</li>

<li>Extended Search (Medium) - Primarily used for searching labels, note text and attachments, this generally isn't a classification system you would created, but is built based on content. </li>

<li>Advanced Search (Complex / Slow) - Similar to Extended search, you would use this for content based searches. However, it allows you to narrow down your search by labels, types, tags, notes, events and attachments.</li>

<li>Reports (Medium to Complex / Slow) - Classification based, you can combine dates of thought activity with tags, types, attachment types, and / or a mixture ofall. In 5.5 and higher, reporting became even more powerful with the addition of one-click reports, saved reports, and filtering.</li>

</ol>

<p>Creating a classification system based purely on the plex, instant search and extended search is relatively easy with a small to medium sized database, as it's all tied into thought names and their relationships. Adding a simple tagging system will increase the complexity slightly, but will allow you to view groups of thoughts that don't make sense to tie together in the plex easily, just by clicking on the tag.</p>

<p>

However, at a certain database size and density, the classification system around your thoughts becomes more critical. Groupings must become more scaleable, and topics have to be generalized to encompass more areas, which drill down into subareas until you have your base information. A good place to get an idea on how to do this is Wikipedia's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Main_topic_classifications" rel="nofollow">own classification system</a>. The wikipedia has to group a huge number of diverse topics, and is an excellent source of ideas. However, this classification system still only takes into account the Plex, Instant search and Extended search. To allow further information filtering, using multiple tags and types are invaluable.

Types and Tags are considered metadata, meaning they tie information together in ways that aren't limited to the information itself. First, lets look at the difference (see also <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/personalbrain-users/web/structuring-your-thoughts" rel="nofollow">types vs tags</a>)</p>

<h4>Types</h4>

<p>Types are like a folder. If you consider the plex, parent thoughts are like particularly sophisticated folders (as in multiple folders can contain the same subfolder) which contain children (subfolders), and can be linked to different area's of the filesystem (jump thought) which aren't directly related but are useful. These subfolders keep going down until you get your data. </p>

<p>

Types are like another form of folder, this time only allowing one per data, although a type can be a subfolder of another type (called supertypes). This folder can be completely unrelated to the folders the plex uses. Continuing with the filesystem example, types are like file types. There is only one filetype per file (like a text file), which denotes something different than the folder the file is found in. For example, I can group thoughts in different locations by giving them all the type of "People". Now I have a grouping so I can easily show all the "People" thoughts in my Brain.</p>

<p>Tags are more like predefined search terms. I can apply more than one search term to a thought, and it gives me an easy way to find that thought. This means I can define the terms important; buy; today to a thought, and it will show up when I search for my predefined term important, along with all the other thoughts I've assigned that term.</p>

<p>

This becomes even more useful when I consider the fact that I can combine tags and types to further narrow things down. For example, I have a lot of important thoughts right now, and I only want to see the ones that have the type of people. So I run a report based on the important tag and have a type of people. Because I can have multiple tags, I can narrow down my search even further by running a report on all thoughts with the type of people, and have the tags important AND today.</p>

<p>

Whew, as you can see, there are a lot of things to keep in mind when creating a classification system.

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