About the "no compound tiddler title" recommandation

[Eric N.]

(reposting as a new topic, which I thought I did, but somehow failed to :))

Hi,

Reacting to a recent message from Mat stating :

good elemental best practices in tiddlywiki, like the no compound tiddler title 

In my use case, I couldn't do without compound tiddler title, i.e. titles prefixed by their types.

Any recommendations about how to improve my data model and data exploration solutions ?

= = = = = =

My use case

My use case is about multidisciplinary knowledge acquisition, exploration and consolidation.

I am dealing with the following tiddler categories:

1. Source, information source - ex: "so An Analysis of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason -- by author X"
   
1. tagged with Domain(s), Thinker(s), Topic(s)
2. Domain, Domain of Knowledge - ex: "do Philosophy"
1. recursively tagging sub (sub (sub...)) domains, to form a tree of domains, 
2. the head of domains being called "do Domain"
3. Thinker, the producer of the views in question - ex: "th Kant"
4. Topic, the subjects discussed - ex: "to Reasoning", "to Enlightenment", ...
5. and Notes, summaries of the views exposed in the sources
1. main note tagged with the source
2. other notes tagged with it's father note (classical tagging way to deal with large information)
3. thus all these notes about this source form one / several tree(s) of notes all going up back to the source
4. if a specific note is about a specific Thinker, Field or Topic, that is not already mentioned in the source, then it is tagged with these specific tags.

At first: no compound titles, just tagging

At first, all topics were tagged by Topic, all sources by Source, etc. and titles didn't contain a prefix.

But when I wanted to explore categories (i.e. main tags) all the data was mangled in the simplest data exploration tool I knew : the table of content, as in

<<toc-selective-expandable "Domain">>

• includes all the domains and subdomains and subsubdomains in a nice tree view
• but also all the sources (indeed tagged by domains)
• and all the notes (indeed tagged by sources, and by domains)
• ...

and I did't want that. I just wanted to explore Domain names, and get more information only when I click on a specific domain name.

Then: compound titles + tagging for visual separation

To solve the above issue I thought : OK if data get mangled, but at least I want elements to be clearly grouped in the TOC display.

Prefix + alphabetical sort made it work. With the same <<toc-selective-expandable "Domain">>, I was better. I had all the sub domains listed, then thinkers, then topics, sources. And notes in between these groups, because they had no prefix. At least I could easily find my subfields.

Then: compound titles, no tagging for the expected result

No more sources tagged with Source, thinkers tagged with thinkers, etc. Only using prefix to indicated the category.

One exception: Domains, because they are a tree. So each domain was tagged by its parent domain, and the top domains were tags as "do Domain".

With <<toc-selective-expandable "do Domain" "prefix[do ]">>, I could have the table of content display I was looking for : domains and subdomains, subsubdomains, etc.

So....

Are there any TW benefits I am missing with these prefixes and lack of main tags categories (no Topic, no Source, ...) ?

And could I have dealt with my issue in a better way ?

Best,

Eric N.

[Mat]

Eric N. wrote:

Reacting to a recent message from Mat stating :

good elemental best practices in tiddlywiki, like the no compound tiddler title 

Actually, that's not me you're quoting but TonyM.

My reply isn't going to be very deep because something came up but, briefly, sure you can use compound titles (to, I presume, categorize things) but the system is primarily designed to use e.g tags for grouping things. Maybe this doesn't work for your use case.

<:-)

[Mark S.]

There's nothing wrong with compound titles per se. Just don't store information in them for later extraction.

It's possible that you should be using fields instead of tags for some of your info management.

However, your first problem is that you have tagged source tiddlers with 3 other kinds of tagging. One workaround would be to tag your sources as "Sources". Then use the "sort" parameter of your TOC macro to exclude anything tagged "Source". The sort subfilter might look something like:

"!tag[Source]"

[Eric N.]

Thanks Mat, and sorry for the wrong quote attribution :)

[Eric N.]

On Wednesday, April 29, 2020 at 9:47:14 PM UTC+4, Mark S. wrote:

However, your first problem is that you have tagged source tiddlers with 3 other kinds of tagging. One workaround would be to tag your sources as "Sources". Then use the "sort" parameter of your TOC macro to exclude anything tagged "Source". The sort subfilter might look something like:

"!tag[Source]"

Makes sense, thanks !