⏾ Concept Map

Record of overlap

|↑| Records | Record of overlap | Record of overlap query

Maintaining consistency and avoiding contradictions while double-listing concepts is the hardest part of building the map. A number of systems and tricks are employed to keep things from becoming chaotic, or tangled, which otherwise happens easily.

Foremost, the code encased in {} snaps each case of overlap to a known patern. In these codes, the trailing punctuation mark communicates visibility of connections:

  • _: Truncates (@).
  • !: Visible: All connections are visible in plain English.
  • *: Hidden: All connections but the main have been condensed to a symbol on the right-hand side.
  • ;: Any.

Hiding a connection (*) creates a distinction between main and alternative pathways. The four vertical dots ⁞ separate these, and the hidden connections are considered to be tags. 1

Here are the patterns and their justifications.

There are also cases of overlap which are forgiven and not monitored, since they’re ubiquitous and self-tracking, and labelling them all would be burdensome rather than helpful:

  • All special relationships (see Record of special relationships).
  • Inter-domain passage, where the northeast arrow effectively nullifies the connection as a concern.
  • The first superscript-i connection given to the imitation spheres, where the pattern is to hang off of the idea and signal back to the shell from which ideas are being grouped.
  • The X of Y sets, which do the same.
  • The expanded lexical sets, which hang off of the category which shares their symbol while signaling back to the top level.
  • Upsizers, which remain at root and take that which would have been their main connection at the side.
  • Floating sets, which hang off of the relevant set while signaling back to the root floating set of the same symbol.
  • Overlapping patterns in the predefined sets:
    • Subsets, which display ❪✺_❫ Subs and sneak in ❪✺₄❫ Sets.
    • Tech, which sneaks in ❪✺₃❫ Particulars.
    • Math, which sneaks in ❪✺❫ Concepts.
    • ❪∈₂❫ Sets (in math), which sneaks in ❪✺₄❫ Sets (in anything).
Gathering Sets

A superscript + creates a gathering set. These snatch and collect things from conceptually distant places. Different from the other symbol mutations in that it doesn’t change the meaning of the set. Instead, it’s an administrative device for keeping track of overlap.

Anything could be a gathering set, but a few common members are:

  • “Classes of…”
  • “Units of…”
  • Modules
  • Constants
  • Libraries
  • Some other software things
Domain Heredity

A concept is considered to have the heredity of its visible parents and lives on-disk in the same domain as them. For more than one parent:

  • If they’re both under the same umbrella, the child lives there too, reading left to right.
  • If they’re not, the child lives in the {cross} directory.

There are two major exceptions:

Tags, Truncates?

The (&) gate marks standard cases of overlap. The (+) gate marks a tag, which is a more intuitive way to think about the same thing when it occurs with a hidden connection.

Truncation (@) is a special case where a set member collapses to rest on something other than the set while retaining it in the hook.

Try looking at the patterns in the combined headers displayed at Aerial of Branching for a sense of the difference between them.

Nonhooking Sets

These sets leave the box empty, usually because the word is too vague to fully describe its members. This isn’t necessarily a problem, as being overly specific can fragment information and make it harder to find related ideas next to one another. Whether or not to remove something from these sets to somewhere else downstream, under a more informative name, is a matter of discretion.

They also take the dashed rather than solid arrow.

See Record of overlap query

Footnotes

  1. Conversely, leaving an overlapped connection visible results in more than one “main” pathway, and more than one up arrow. ↩