Barmaley

@Peterkin Thank you for wiliness to help! Please, keep in mind that the site is in its infancy and we are working on a beta version to test functionality, so we could define the features for the next version. There are currently two pages which you may suggest changes from aesthetics and them most important, easiness of information retrieval. Obviously, the first is the knowledge page which is currently made without any professional design by developers. Next step would be to decide what is needed to be added to the knowledge tree page. Next step would be how to make it beautiful and easy to navigate. The second page which is challenging here is the main page where users can communicate their ideas. It is similar to a nested forum but provides more options and controls. The objective is to deliberate a selected topic in depth rather then to briefly discuss many topics which typical for standard forums. It should be possible here to examine every essential element if the topic with a goal to achieve a closure in the discussion (as far as it can be achieved). Obviously not every topic worth such efforts, however, if a topic as an essential to us we need a tool to make it fruitful. The thread here is nester where several users can respond to original post as well as many users can provide a response to any reply to the post. It means that a sidetrack post can not distract from the main topic. In addition it is possible to start a branch topic to focus on a part of a post (for instance, to argue one specific statement which seems to be controversial but is an important part of the subject under consideration). In addition the users can instead of sending a reply can comment inside the post or create an edit of the same post. It was found that editing other people writing is another form of communicating your ideas. This is just a brief overview of the tool and it is hard to describe it in a short paragraph. For users who are not in a position to submit a full format post there is an option to comment to other posts, thus each post has comment thread which is essentially a standard nested forum style thread. We created a beta version of the engine and found it to be not too user's friendly. To provide flexibility to review the posts we introduced a mouse drug function of posts so you can re-arrange them on a screen in any possible way but the screen can easily become a mess and we decided to convert it from drug to scroll for easier users experience. Since there are two major types of posts (replies and edits) we have to provide two ways of scroll: vertical and horizontal. It may take several day for me to provide with screen shots of the main page made in the scroll mode. I know that this description was not clear to understand without seeing it in actions but I did the best I can provided that English in not my native language. Thank you very much the suggestion! It is really useful, I was actually was looking for already tested solutions like this. The next top level subject I can steal to our knowledge tree would be entertainment. For the most part I have problems with this classification and I am sure it is a fruit of my ignorance. 0 is Science and Knowledge. 9 is Geography.... History. I thought that geography are history are science? If 0 is science then 3 3 Social sciences should be a sub-subject of 0 science I guess... The most fun I had with #4. If this is not patented I am going to steal this idea and use it! I am still looking for a one word term for human-centric subject which can host a bunch of sub-categories. Are there any objections on having on the first level Science, Art, Events, Entertainment and Esotericism? The goal of the tree is to provide fast and intuitive way to get to any subject on knowledge in the minimum number of steps on the tree.

Excellent point! I would even go further and make it Events instead of Current Events following the same logic - for how long events are current? This help could be very essential since we are trying to solve another hurdle: the structure of the site is multi-nested (it means that you may nest elements inside a larger element which can be nested to its parents). In addition we will allow multiple entries (edits) of the same article which makes it a 3D structure which we must show on a flat 2D screen. We have several solutions and and still working on design and aesthetics of layout. Is your site still live and is it available to public to see? Not really. We are working on a tool for deliberation of complicated concepts and theories. So far I can see only 4 subjects which deserve to be starters for all branches of knowledge: Science, Art, Events and Esotericism (Religions, conspiracy theories and all forms of unknown). Am I missing something here or everything can be squeegeed in one of those categories?

This is the only based on usability of the website screen site which has to contain all the subjects on one page for better users experience. We thought that it was always possible to combine sub-subject into a group to which we can provide descriptive title. For instance if you use "cats" as a parent the do not have to list all the cats in the next level as children but divide them first into Large Cats, Medium Cats, Small cats and Cats without stripes to kind of evenly divide the children into groups. The benefit of this approach is efficiency for a user to get to his subject quickly since if are you looking for a tiger you do not need to review a list of 300 types of cats but first select large cats and then look for tigers. @Peterkin, since you have experience of working with a child/parent classification list we would appreciate any advice you may give us in the knowledge tree construction. It is important to note that we are not only focus on science subjects but all real word thing. For instance we need a chapter for "News" since in the portal which we are trying to do we need to foresee all possible area of human interest which people many be willing to discuss. This is what does not let us sleep at night! LOL. In our case we have to give an option to users to be able to contribute to the tree development (which obviously will be heavily moderated). He hope that after initial push the tree will grow itself.

Hello Everybody, I need your help in a project which I am trying to do on the web. Part of the project is what I call a Tree of Knowledge. We would like to let our users to get to any subject of general knowledge by dividing global knowledge into sections. It is easier to explain in example. If we have a starting subject as Math, then we can make sub-subjects like Algebra, Arithmetic, Geometry, Statistics etc. At the same time sub-subject Geometry can be in its turn to be divided to lower level sub-subjects like Axioms, Definitions, Nonlinear Geometry etc. To make the tree manageable we decided to limit to 8 number of children each parent subject my have. Now the challenge: how to start. We think that the very top it easy: we call it Everything and it is a starting Subject. Now we need to divide it into first 8 sub-subjects on the most rational way. Obviously, we can start with Science, Art, and Humanity. Some people suggest to add Religion as a top sub-subject. What does philosophy prescribe as the top level of knowledge division? Sorry for this unusual request but we hope to be forgiven considering the fact that our technical university in the former Soviet Union taught us Communist's philosophy instead of real thing, so you help will be highly appreciated!