motivation for raising the "multiple parents" question

From: Eugene Eric Kim (eekim@eekim.com)
Date: Thu Jan 04 2001 - 10:25:58 PST


[Moving this thread to ohs-dev.]

On Wed, 3 Jan 2001, Garold L. Johnson wrote:

> I conclude that multiple parents, clones, references or whatever we call
> them are an essential part (as opposed to an accidental part) of knowledge
> management, and are thus a requirement in any serious system.

I should clarify my original thinking during my informal discussion with
Eric. Eric was thinking about data structures, and had run into
complexity when trying to incorporate the multiple parents requirement.
I asked about use cases, not so much to see whether we need multiple
parents (I agree that the answer is definitely yes), but to see if they
could shed some light on how this functionality could be implemented.

The terms we use for these "multiple parents" -- "clones, references or
whatever" -- can be important because they actually carry some design
baggage. For instance, is cloning sufficient to implement this
functionality? It's clearly not, as Eric's use case points out.

-Eugene

-- 
+=== Eugene Eric Kim ===== eekim@eekim.com ===== http://www.eekim.com/ ===+
|       "Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they        |
+=====  can have an excuse to drink alcohol."  --Steve Martin  ===========+



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