TypeOf

TypeOf answers the question in PersonalBrain of “What is it?” and “What Thoughts are of type …”?. It is a remembering pattern that provides quick navigation to thoughts based on the type of thing they represent.

Intent

Your brain is be enhanced by knowing the type of a Thought. If your Thoughts have a type, you can query your brain using categorisations and recall thoughts quicker. Type Of works for PersonalBrain 2.x but is enhanced when using PersonalBrain 3.0 because you can additionally assign a single “Thought Type” to a Thought

Until your brain evolves into something complex, the issue of type is easily handled. You can either:

• Ignore it completely and rely on your own memory. This strategy only works for a short time.
• Modify the name to include the type. Elton John is a singer and so we could name thoughts as “Elton John (Singer)”. But Elton John is also a musician. “Elton John (Singer)(Musician)” is unwieldly and becomes difficult to use quickly. We call this a problem of scalability. At a large scale it doesn’t work.

The Type Of pattern shows you how to assign multiple types to a Thought and do so in a scalable manner. It works by adding a separate layer of organisation that is easy to manage and navigate, yet does not impact on the more important contexts in which a Thought may lie.

Also Known As

Ontology – This type of categorisation is called an Ontology in the Topic Map space. PersonalBrain delivers a subset of the Topic Map standard

Motivation

My brain contains references to a large number of organisations. Through the use of Type Of I am able to ask the following questions:

“Who are the software vendors?”

“Which organisations are educational?”

“What type of company is Telstra?” (telecommunications company)

The root of my Type Of structure is shown below. You can set your own types as relevant to you. This example shows all the categories on the right with sub-categories of “Types of Software” shown as the Child Thoughts. One of the best things about Type Of is that you can start simply and expand as needed.

Applicability

Brain wide. Use for categorisation of all types of Thoughts where creating a dedicated Thought Type is too much.

Collaborations

Type Of does not collaborate directly with other patterns.

Consequences

There are no known consequences of Type Of. If your typing is overly complex it may become difficult to adjust or correct. This is the risk of all categorisation structures.

Implementation

There are a number of ways to make Type Of very powerful.

• Pin it – Create a Pin to the root TypeOf thought for quick access.
• Jump link to it rather than parent link – Assign type categories to a Thought using the Jump gate. This keeps the type separate from the context. (Update 2011-08-13, I’ve moved away from this an now use a parent child structure)
• Colour code it – Create a Thought Type called “Type Of” (or “Ontology”) as per the example below and colour code it to a grey. Assign all ;to; Thoughts to the type. Like the previous tip, this helps to hide the type information until needed. In the example shown, Organisations have been coloured orange as well so that I know the base type is “Organisation”. ;to; gives me more specific detail when needed.

Sample Plex

See above for examples.

Known Uses

Remembering the type of a Thought for speed of navigation.

Related Patterns

Type Of makes extensive use of :at: for the Jump linking and :dt: for the creation of categories.

This post originally appeared on Thought?Horizon as part of the Brainwaves package.