The portal is familiar to users of the Web, inasmuch as we use them and they are essential to us, but portals on the Web are rather strange.
Their strangeness manifests in response to their purpose, which is to provide access to all knowledge, but why do they treat all knowledge as an undifferentiated or, to put it another way, unordered thing? For a long time I have thought it would be an extremely easy thing, if only one could devise the right approach, to organize all knowledge - and by extremely easy I mean something I could by rights do by myself.
I must acknowledge, however, that devising the right approach remained beyond me for a very long time. I knew the structure would be that of a tree, but to what would its major parts correspond? Certain possibilities seemed obvious, for instance, perhaps, Science, Philosophy, Art, or some such combination, but these kinds of categories never quite made sense to me.
I have now, I think, hit upon a solution, by treating the first branches not as divisions of knowledge per se, as in different kinds of information, say, but as human concerns. This is my interpretation.
Also, in the computer environment, the tree appears in something of a new way, and this seems not to be clearly recognized. I mean, it appears, and appears everywhere, and this is the result of the effort and decisions of developers, but it consistently appears in a kind of secondary position, and in highly regulated representations, as if to suggest that trees ought to be all right angles, or some such thing. Well, here at aportal I have been experimenting for a long time with a less regulated representation of the tree - what we call the x-tree, the information tree - and now I think I am able to demonstrate it in a small way.
As regards the smallness of it I would say that it seems to me to embody the arboreal potential for growth.
Well, as I began to think about this introduction, I began to think I really ought to look up this thing, which I thought was a thing, The Tree of Knowledge. I was going to write that it has already codified for ages, and that its name was the name of an established thing. Looking it, just now, though, I found that it was not quite as simple as that. In the encyclopedia, in fact, there was no actual entry for the term.
However, studying the disambiguation, I identified a link that looked the most promising ... and it was precisely what I was seeking.
And it was amazing.
