Books/chapters and directories/files - dichotomies considered harmful

The distinction between a full book and a mere chapter of a book, is a source of endless fascination for incurable information modellers like me.

Obviously, at the logical level, the distinction is driven by the content itself. A book is a complete unit of stuff. A chapter, is a sub-division within the complete book. At the physical level, however, technology starts to influence the book/chapter distinction. A chapter boundary, for Microsoft Word users or Open Office users, is likely to be influenced by how big the underlying file gets. Large files take longer to load and get increasingly slower to work with in typical word processing environments. Our decisions about where to draw the chapter boundaries are influenced to some extent by technology limitations.

If the physical constraints are not allowed to dictate the boundaries for chapters, then we can end up resorting to file naming conventions to split the content into manageable chunks e.g. chapter1_a, chapter1_b and so on. We might then decide to keep things clean by introducing a subdirectory for each chapter, putting the sub-chapters tidily away in their own little compartments.

All is well with the world. Or is it? This is where things get interesting from an information management perspective. A full unit of work - a book - has now been split into bits that are navigable through a directory structure and bits that are navigable through an application. The result? You can use off-the-shelf tools to navigate your way through the directories. You can see the overall structure of the book by simply looking at the directory structure as a hierarchy. You can see that chapter 1 has a number of sub-chapters. However, that is as far as you can go. To dig any further into the structure of chapter 1, section A, you need to launch the editing application.

What a pity.

Why is it, that we have this hard and fast dichotomy between directory structure and file structure? Why is it that file system exploring utilities need to stop in their tracks when they hit things called 'files'?

As you have probably noticed, this artificial split can be breached in certain circumstances, at least to some extent. Graphics file formats are a good example. Many file system exploring tools know about, say, JPEG files and can display thumbnails of their contents.

That is a start in the right direction but I think it needs to go a lot further if the artificial directory/file distinction is to be eradicated.

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