Hierarchical labels

We all have a lot of personal information that we need to store one way or another: to do lists, photos, project plans, scientific research, etc.

What's the best way to store it?  Through an email account? Microsoft Word? Google Docs & Spreadsheets?  Facebook?  Picassa?  A personal computer?  An email account is not good for information that needs to be continually revised.  I never use my computer to store critical information.  For things I need to plan (holidays, projects, etc) I tend to use Google Documents, but am annoyed by the "flatness" of the documents; whether writing a to-do list, a blog, or a thesis, I like to create sub-to-do lists, go off on tangents, and link my ideas back to my research.  All of which I can't do with Google Documents or other existing technologies.

What are some of the requirements of a simple information storage system?  Personally, I would like to:

1. Store my information how I want, immediately.
   
2. Retrieve any piece of information I've stored, immediately.
   
3. And while working on a particular project, I want the most relevant information on that proect to be automatically displayed on my screen, no matter when I first entered that information.
   

CiteHouse does these things via the use of hierarchical labels (and a few other nifty innovations).  

Hierarchical labels are the best solution for storing semi-structured, and continuously changing data.  If you have used Windows Explorer to store your data, you may have found a problem where you go to file away, say, your family photographs.  Let's say you've just had a holiday in Cairns with your family.  Do you put your photos in a "Cairns Holiday" folder?  Or do you put them in a "Family Photos" folder?  It's annoying that you can't put them in both, without wasting disk space.  This is partly solved by the use of "tags".  In a tag-based application, you tag the photos with both the "Cairns" tag and the "Family Photos" tag.  But what if you now want to tag the "Cairns Holiday" with a "Favourite Holidays List" tag?  In many tag-based applications, you can't!

Hierarchical labels solves this problem.  They are a cross between a "folder" and a "tag".  Any folder/tag you create can be tagged with any other folder/tag.  CiteHouse uses hierarchical tags such as not to hinder how you store your information; you have the freedom to create the "folder structure" you like.  In fact, CiteHouse doesn't make any distinction between a tag, folder and a note.  They are essentially the same thing!  With CiteHouse, anything you write down can later be used as a tag/folder to organize your ideas.  Thus, CiteHouse allows you to quickly store your information, without worrying about how it is stored in the long term.

For instance, let's say you come up with an idea of having an army of robotic snowplows for winter:

Then you can start jotting down ideas:

Maybe even give it a few tags of it's own:

Some ideas will spawn other ideas that you've have worked on!  Thankfully you can simply put your "Obstacle detection" idea in to "Delivery robot", even if you never thought a "Delivery robot" would be important when you noted it down 6 months ago!

(don't worry about the numbers "6562..", it's a temporary measure).  Anything you type in to CiteHouse can be used to store anything else you may type in.  You are not hindered in how you store your information.

Now let's say you wake up at 3am with a great idea to give your robots the voice of Mila Kunis.  All you need do is type it in the "Note ... into ..." box in CiteHouse.  You don't need to load anything up, or navigate to the correct folder/note.  You just type in your idea, and where you want to put it, and CiteHouse will automatically suggests the rest:  

CiteHouse also allows you to drag and drop your notes around...so you can quickly order a to-do list, or file away important information.

For the adventurous, a pre-beta version of CiteHouse is available at http://citehouse.dynalias.com:11795/.