[Clipart] Navigation in the OCAL

[Greg Steffensen]

> 
> Other idea: directory hierarchy of the OCAL is so-called metadata too. 
> With
> manifest it can be understandable for users too.


I'm glad this was brought up. In terms of organizing images, the directory 
hierarchy actually serves a function very similar to keywords. Basically, 
one organizes images by topic in trees, the other organizes them by topic in 
sets. Without going into excessive detail, I'd like to suggest that a shift 
from organizing information in trees to sets is one of the major themes of 
current software development. If you look at things like
del.icio.us<http://del.icio.us>and flickr tags, gmail labels,
Evolution virtual folders, Beagle, and even
plain old Google searching (as opposed to Yahoo/DMOZ category browsing), all 
try to organize leaf nodes (and only leaf nodes) in sets. 

As long as we're planning on a major overhaul using DMS, this is one feature 
I think we should look into providing. I think the standard
(del.icio.us<http://del.icio.us>)
way to provide it would be to let users browse by showing them a list of the 
most popular keywords, and then when the select one, show the most popular 
other keywords for images that match the current query. Of course, its 
easier to suggest these things than to implement them (especially since I 
don't yet do perl), but implementation should be pretty straightforward if 
metadata (or at least keywords) are kept in an sql database. To transition, 
you'd just turn category names into keywords. Then again, OCAL seems to work 
well now, and if it isn't broke, don't fix it.

Greg
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