Two parents for a node?
Malik de Kok
Traditionally, mindmapping software sticks to the rule of ‘one parent per node’. This always results in some form of tree structure. Whether circular, left-right or top-down, there is always a central item or root from which branches unfold. That’s easy. It’s clear. But is it always enough?
The human mind likes to make the universe manageable by thinking in categories. It’s the famous ‘Rule of Seven’ in action: whenever a number of items to arrange gets too big, we create categories and arrange those. A supermarket may have twelve thousand items on its shelves. A robot would probably arrange them alphabetically, or sort them on their bar code number – why not? But for us humans, with our limited memories and processing power, that doesn’t work. So we create categories. There is a wine department, with a subdivision of red wines, further divided in countries of origin. Then there are shelves for the various production regions, and only then we get to the real stuff: bottles of wine from various houses in those regions.
No problem so far. Every wine has a place to go. But if I need a robust red wine with some tannin and a flavor of oak to go with my dish, it could originate from France, Chile, Italy or New Zealand. Immediately I need a guidebook or a very qualified salesperson to solve my problem.
Translated into mindmap terms, this means that in the wine hierarchy sketched here, I would have to add a completely different dimension (‘taste’ or ‘type’), which doesn’t show in the map (on the shelves). Wouldn’t it be easier to be able to add a second parent to all items? A wine would then have a place both in the origin hierarchy and in the taste hierarchy.
American readers will realize that this question is far from hypothetical. American supermarkets tend to organize wines based on the grape type. The Chardonnays sit with the Chardonnays, a situation one will not find in Europe. Nothing wrong – just another organizing principle.
What are your ideas? Do you manage to fit your world in a ‘one node – one parent’ hierarchy?
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