We already have Obsidian, Notion and Wikimedia, and the IT world is flooded with CMDBs of various kinds. So what makes Syscat different?
It's in the combined effect of several principles for organising information:
- Separate the identity of each thing from its meaning.
- Explicitly represent its relationships to other things as named entities in their own right.
- Categorise things into structured types, so that each thing is an instance of its own type.
- Each of a thing's attributes can be defined, complete with its data type (integer, variable-length string, unbounded text, or boolean). Now you can find information about a given characteristic without having to read through a wall of text, and templates cease to be needed.
- Explicitly acknowledge that some things exist only in the context of some other thing, e.g. chapters of a book, and that these dependency relationships can form an inverted tree of any depth.
- Front-load your thinking.
- Syscat prompts you to do your thinking as you put the information in, and to think through structures and relationships ahead of time.
- Note that the structure is not set in stone; you can add new types, and add attributes and relationships, at any time.
- This is not a system you dump data into, and then infer a structure afterwards. These systems also have their place, but that's not the problem I was solving here.
- Syscat prompts you to do your thinking as you put the information in, and to think through structures and relationships ahead of time.