[om-list] organising and creating textual information

[OneModel general list]

Luke writes:

On 04/23/16 15:24, OneModel general list[from hendrick] wrote:
 > I've been thinking of doing something for information capture and
 > storage in the area of fiction writing specifically, and in general as
 > an idea organizer.
 >
 > That said, I still have no idea what your system actually *does* as
 > opposed to what you'd like it to do.

Right now, OM brings up a menu and you press letters to navigate to the 
point in your data of interest.  Then you can press 1 to create a new 
entity, by typing in up to 160 characters of text as its name.  You can 
add attributes to the entity (currently a quantity or number with type 
and unit like 5 meters length, or a date, boolean, file (actual binary 
content), or textattribute (like a quotation or stack trace or serial 
#).  You can use simple menu options to associate the entity with other 
entities or group them, by defining relationships.  The demo video you 
mention in your other email would certainly help.  The live demo at the 
telnet site would let you test out this much and ask questions.

  (1) It has to be compatible with distributed revision control (I use
> monotone for this, the same issues arise with just about every such
> system, including git)
>
> (2) It has to be able to express mathematics.  (markdown has plugins
> that interpret Latex, though you need different plugins if you're
> generating html or pdf).
>
> If you like, I could scrounge around my file system and collect the
> relevant ideas.  (this scrounging around is exactly what I want this
> system for, of course)
>
> -- hendrik

Do you use monotone to keep backups of these .md files? I'm not sure 
what to say there. OM keeps its data in postresql rows and columns, and 
there isn't currently a revision control concept in it, though one could 
be considered for the future. I'd have to have a clearer idea of the use 
cases. I was hoping to work on "distributed data" (or sharing between OM 
instances first though, but this is worth discussing anyway.  I make 
periodic backups of my data, which works for me, and I haven't had to 
restore.  I also use .git for other things, like the source code, where 
I go back in time, but the same need for OM data has never arisen.  I 
have many notes, I navigate among them, and it just works, as far as 
that goes.  I do reorganize them often to save off less-interesting 
things, or archive individual entities (like marking to-do items as 
done) so they disappear from view but remain in the database.

For the mathematics, at what point in your workflow do you need to view 
it as symbols? Currently one enters data into OM by typing text from the 
keyboard, which could include some latex, but then it will also display 
it as text when viewed. The html export could be modified, maybe, to 
convert the latex to something else to view as html, but I'm not sure if 
that helps your use case, since I don't know enough about your use case.

Could you describe your usage more? And comment or ask questions about 
the above? Maybe that will spur ideas.  I can think more about it, on 
Monday.
		
-Luke

(ps: the fact that the list can hide senders' email addresses, which is 
good for their privacy, might make it more work to see who is talking in 
these threads, over time.  Hmmm.  A habit signing one's name at top & 
bottom could help, but is fallible or more easily manipulable; I realize 
email addresses are too, but people don't usually, in such a forum. 
Maybe there's a better approach.)