Interesting Discussion about Piggydb at outlinersoftware.com
Posted: September 11, 2012 Filed under: uncategorized 5 Comments »An interesting discussion about Piggydb has been going on at outlinersoftware.com, which was mentioned in a blog comment (thanks, Alexander!).
Piggydb is a kind of software that is difficult to explain, so I have been struggling to find good words to describe this software to people who are not familiar with this organizing tool sphere (whereas I think the difficulty of explaining is important to invent a new paradigm).
Piggydb is certainly similar to an outliner.
By the way, in Japan, outliners are often called ‘Idea Processors’. I don’t know why, but I guess they focus on the MindMap-like functionality of a tree structure.
I think that an outliner is a basically one-theme-session-oriented organizing tool (like a MindMap), while Piggydb is for a longer span of idea exploration involving multiple themes. And also, there is the difference of the organizing processes: top-down (outliner) and bottom-up (Piggydb).
Then, most importantly, Piggydb has been striving to extend organizing or structuring functionality to promote concept discovery (structuring ‘information’ into ‘knowledge’ and more, ‘wisdom’ maybe). I’m going to write about it in detail in the series of articles ‘The Piggydb Way’.
Anyway, it is very inspiring to see discussions on a site like outlinersoftware.com. If you are interested in outliner software, definitely check it out 
Thank you for the mention Daisuke! At the outlinersoftware.com forum we have often discussed about the limitations of classic outliners. Their strong point –hierarchy- can become a weakness when you have items that fit in multiple branches. Even in mind maps, which in practice are outlines on a plane, you often have to link nodes from opposite sides of the map. Piggydb overcomes this limitation with the relational links but also with the hierarchical tagging, which is the hierarchy without the category limitation. So yes, I believe you are on to something with the “Piggydb Way”.
By the way, if there’s one major suggestion I want to make for Piggydb, it is to have some form of export, e.g. a web publish function. I’m not sure how this would work in practice, in terms of the structure, but now it is very difficult to get “out” what is in Piggydb.
Hi Alexander,
Thank you for your comment.
As for publishing functionality, I think there are two ways to implement it. One is to extend the current Document View to be more browsing friendly, and the other is to provide more flexible export functionality that allows you to export a certain part of your database in a more portable format.
I would personally vote for the latter. Being able to export into some universal format (XML, CSV, …) would be useful for getting material to other programs. A third alternative would be to export to some javascript module which allows one to view the database but not edit it.
I don’t know if you are familiar with the Brainstorm software; see the last part of this video http://www.brainstormsw.com/sbp/index.html for its “web publish” feature which works this way. You may want to download the trial version and see it for yourself.
Thanks for the info about the Brainstorm software, which I’ve never heard of before, but seems like an interesting software and I’m interested more in its history.
I feel the Brainstorm’s “web publish” feature is more like the Document View if it has more dynamic behaviors by JavaScript. The Document View is not exactly an exporting feature though.
I am definitely interested in implementing flexible import/export features and have been thinking about how to do that, so your suggestion is really helpful.
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