Hey, Alex.
Traction definitely got the interface and functionality right wrt
categorization.
Much of my observation came out of a demo I was given on the system.
One interface aspect that should be in some of the pictures is that
the categories are shown as a linear list, in a light blue (pastel)
color,
to the right of each paragraph. That makes the categorizations
visible, but the use of a pastel color puts them more in the background.
Categorizing an entry in the system constitutes a "change", and every
user of the system sees the result. That makes it possible for me to
categorize a thing, and someone else's search for things of that type
suddenly makes it show up. (Something that could be very powerful
with topic maps.)
In a mediated interactive FAQ, for example, you could ask a question
that the system doesn't know how to answer. As a mediator capable
of understanding your question, I could add categories to existing
material, rerun your query, and deliver the new material. The advantage
would be that in the future, similar queries would be automatically
answered.
When changing the structure of the categories themselves, Traction
produced a list of all entries that had the old category, and let you
select the items which would fall in the new category. The demo I
saw was this:
* You decide to change the ToDo category to Bug/ToFix and
Enhancement/ToImplement, as part of a larger hierarchy that
contains Bug/Done, Enhancement/ToEvaluate,
Enhancement/Deferred, and Enhancement/Done.
* You go into the system and tell the system to rename ToDo to
Bug/ToFix.
* The system shows you a list of all entries with the ToDo category.
You can start with them all off, and select the ones you want to
change. Or you can start with them all selected, and deselect ones
that shouldn't change.
* You carry out the transition to Bug/ToFix, and then rename the
remainder to Enhancement/ToEvaluate. When the last ToDo
item is recategorized, you retire that category.
Finally, Traction maintained an audit trail of the changes you made in
that process. You look at the change history to see what changes
were made to the categories, which entries were affected as a
result, and who made the changes.
In short, it was beautifully done. The foregoing summary of their
work constitutes a feature/requirements specification for
categorization,
in my view. Basically, they did it right.
Now if I could just get Traction integrated with Mifflin integrated with
Topic Maps integrated with...
Alex Shapiro wrote:
> Hi Eric,
>
> I've been reading up on traction, and it seems pretty cool. In fact,
> it
> seems pretty close to what I have in mind as a fist stage for visual
> forums. (With change logging as a big bonus)
>
> All I've been able to find out about it though, is this article:
> http://www.welchco.com/04/00067/60/00/04/1401.HTM, and another saying
> basically the same thing.
>
> Are there any pictures of the interface available? The site
> http://www.twisted-systems.com/ is password protected. ... is there a
> guest
> account?
>
> Thanks
>
> --Alex
>
> At 02:10 PM 9/26/01 -0700, Eric Armstrong wrote:
> >"Faceted classification" was simply known as "categorization" in
> >Traction.
> >We've had categorization as a requirement for a long time.
>
>
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