Symbolic Names are a way of organizing and navigation material - in a set of wikis, on the web, on your personal computer, in databases, spreadsheet, documents and other files.
The Hyperlinked, Searchable, Universal Web
The web works on links, which are addresses. When you click on a link you go to the address the link points to.
In order to add some semantic meaning to web pages people use tags, which are attached to links. Some tags can be made up by the people who are applying them, others are determined by well developed ontologies.
Web pages looked at from the point of view of addresses are seen to contain content. Just as a city, looked at from the point of view of addresses, contains houses and buildings. Content is held in the web page as if the web page were a container. The page can be given a title, and its content can be described and keywords can be supplied for it. It is as if the web page where a shipping carton, and tags, descriptions and keywords were pasted on the outside of it like labels.
Conversations that Define the Local Readable and Writeable Web
Like tags keywords and description, symbolic names add semantic meaning, but they add it to page as a kind of text, rather than to the page as content in a container. Symbolic names enter into the play of meanings generated by writing or reading the page. They are there for tied to the group of people who write and read the pages they are on and do not have a "universal" application like web page descriptions, keywords and tags.
Atomic Data in the Local Web
Atomic Data is a standard that allows data to be recorded as text inside of web pages and computer files. Unlike names, which associate only with the things they are applied to and with each other, atomic data can be associated with values. Like symbolic names it allows a group of contributors to build up structures in a bottom up way and share them with each other. For more see atomic data.
Symbolic names can be compounds, made up of other symbolic names. Tags can be made up of multiple words, but such a tag does not recognize that the words it is made up of might also be tags. Symbolic names can also be used without being attached to some container or some content, they can refer to each other.
- Symbol names are used and have meaning inside a "conversation". A conversation is a limited domain of people, files or objects within which the names are related to each other.
- A symbol name server or application can support one or more conversations.
- Symbolic names are marked by starting with a "^" followed by any number of characters (but no punctuation or spaces.
- Symbolic names can be compounded by writing one name after the next.
- There is no limit to the number of names that can be compounded together.
- When symbolic names are compounds, any variation of the names they are made up of is treated as the same name:^DollarBill^GeorgeWashington^USPresident is treated as the same name as ^USPresident^GeorgeWashington^DollarBill
- Symbolic names can be used where ever text can be used: they can be part of file names, folder names, web page names. They can be in word processor documents, in spreadsheets or in database records.
- If a symbolic name is used in the "wild", that is, in some program which is not aware of symbolic names, then all names should be compound names, and the first name in all such compounds should indicate the name of the application or server that host should respond to the "wild" name, the second name in the compound should be the "conversation" on that server that the compound name belongs to. The server name should be prefixed with 3 "^" and the conversation name with 2 "^": ^^^seedwiki.com^^tanks2scale^german^panther would be a name that lives on the seedwiki.com server, in the conversation named "tanks2scale"
- "local" as a server name indicates that a symbolic name application is expected to be running on the local computer: ^^^local^^tanks2scale^german^panther would be a name in the "tanks2scale" conversation on my local computer
- If only a conversation name is found for a "wild" symbolic name, then the server is assumed to be "local": so ^^tanks2scale^german^panther in a text file on my computer would be indexed by my local symbolic name application
Using Symbolic Names
You can start using symbolic names without a symbolic name application. You can put them in file names or in the content of files you store on your computer and then use any of the available desktop search applications to find them. Such search applications will not have the ability to manipulate the name space that a symbolic name client or server would, but they will deliver minimual functionality or grouping together resources on your local computer in terms of the names you have used.
The Symbolic Name Bookmarklet
You can click on this link and bookmark it in your browser.
symbolic name
Then, when you are on a web page that you want to assign a symbolic name to, you can click on the bookmarklet. A dialog will open for you to enter the symbolic name you want to use into.
The symbolic name you enter should include the name of an exisiting symbolic name conversation on the seedwiki server:
Example: ^^2scale^tank^panther
This is a symbolic name (^tank^panther) that is intended for use in the ^2scale symbolic name conversation on seedwiki.
Symbolic Names in Microsoft Word
By adding a simple macro you can embed symbolic names in your word documents.
Symbolic Names in Microsoft Excel
By adding a simple macro you can embed symbolic names in your excel documents.
Fuzzy Symbolic Names
While the atoms of a symbolic name have no intrinsic order among themselves, they can be given different weights by adding a decimal at the end of each name atom:
^^tanks2scale^german.4^french.2^charB1
In this symbolic name the atom "german" as the weight of .4, the atom "french" as the weight of .2 and the atom "charB" has the weight of 1
possible weights range from 0 to 1
You do no have to use weights on the atoms of your symbolic names, they will work fine if you just use the simple version. If you do use weights you will be able to navigate your namespace in different ways.
You will be able to find names that have a name atom that matches name atoms in the name you are looking at where the name atoms have a high weight. So in the case of this example I could find other names that had "charB" where its weight was greater than .8, but ignore names where its weight did not come up to that point.
The Arrow Of Time
You can also use a fuzzy notation to describe the relationship of a symbolic name to the resource you are pointing it to. You can say the name should be strongly applied to the resource for a little while and then have the strength of the link fade gradually over time. Or perhaps you might want a link that was very strong until a certain date and then fell off abruptly.
Again, you do not have to qualify the links between names and the resources they point to. An unqualified link always has the same strength and its strength never changes (unless there are general rules in force that affect all links automatically: ie. fading over time, fading if not visited, etc.
Auto Naming
If you are working in the environment watche
Naming Searches
