My first posting here. I have a couple of initial observations and a general question about the strategic direction of this interesting product.
My normal day job is running an information management consultancy specialising in building semantic web based information architectures; commonly called knowledge graphs. I have been intrigued for many years by the problem of information discovery in web systems, but increasingly also in local file system management. Ironically, since I spend my day advising enterprises on how to build structured networks of linked information, I’m pretty hopeless when it comes to managing my own information. I suffer from all of the usual information problems - I can’t remember where I put something, I know that a document belongs to more than one context but can only choose one, I want to specify more than just a general link from stuff to other stuff, by showing how they are linked. And so on.
I came across Hook recently and thought it might help me with some of these information problems, by providing a means of linking one content object to another or to a project, or a person, or something else. It certainly has the indications of the kind of thing that I want to use.
So that brings me to my question on where the product is going. I’d really like to be able to link the document I’m writing, or the image I’m creating, or whatever, to another information object representing the project or the client, with some sort of semantic link such as “this document has project X1234”. Such a link should, as it would in an ontology-based model, have an implicit inverse relation such as “these pieces of content are linked to this project”. It feels to me as though Hook might be the type of product that could develop in this direction, if it were possible to frame it around a semantic information model with classes representing the kind of content object or other thing that needs to be linked. This kind of thing is actually pretty straightforward for web-based information systems, but of course they don’t deal with files in a file system, rather content objects in an information system. So I understand the challenge!
It would be interesting to know whether any of these ideas have any resonance with your plans for Hook.