I've spent the last 3.5 years building a platform for "information applications". The key observation which prompted this was that hierarchical file systems didn't work well for organising information within an organisation.However, hierarchy itself is still incredibly valuable. People think in terms of hierarchies - it's just that they think in terms of multiple hierarchies and an item will almost always belong in more than one place in those hierarchies.If you allow users to describe items in the way which makes sense to them, and then search and browse by any of the terms they've used, then you've eliminated almost all the frustrations of a file system. In my experience of working with people building complex information applications, you need: * deep hierarchy for classifying things * shallow hierarchy for noting relationships (eg "parent company") * multi-values for every single field * controlled values (in our case by linking to other items wherever possible) Unfortunately, none of this stuff is done well by existing database systems. Which was annoying, because I had to write an object store.

So Memex was first and foremost an extension of human memory and the associative movements that the mind makes through information: a mechanical analogue to an already mechanical model of memory. Bush transferred this idea into information management; Memex was distinct from traditional forms of indexing not so much in its mechanism or content, but in the way it organised information based on association. The design did not spring from the ether, however; the first Memex design incorporates the technical architecture of the Rapid Selector and the methodology of the Analyzer — the machines Bush was assembling at the time.

The problem with the annotation notion is that it's the first time that we consider a piece of data which is not merely a projection of data already present in the message store: it is out-of-band data that needs to be stored somewhere.

many of the searches we want to do could be accomplished with a database that was nothing but a glorified set of hash tables

There are objects, sets of objects, and presentation tools. There is a presentation tool for each kind of object; and one for each kind of object set.

The vertices and edges of a graph, known as Atoms, are used to represent not only "data", but also "procedures"; thus, many graphs are executable programs as well as data structures.