Well, you make a fine point about the colors, which were something I'd forgotten to consider. I did (and do) use this approach, but with the passage of time my enthusiasm for the maintenance required has really diminished.
What I am looking for is something in the same ballpark as dynamic graph generation as seen here, but with shareable tagging: https://www.mcnutt.in/forum-explorer/
When you say their spatial orientations and groupings carried meaning for me I wholly agree; What I'm trying to say (poorly uwu) is that managing the finder or other WIMP desktop elements is like laying out a beautiful graph in Visio or some other flowcharting software, vs the sort of dynamic graphs that the computer can render for you on the fly.
Taking the example above and imagining it extended to disks and documents as opposed to topics and comments, suppose you could have nesting nodes, whose size might be a treemap-like function of their content and whose layout might be manged with Apollonian gaskets; and imagine further that I could click on the name of individual contributors (isomorphic to file properties or curated tags) and quickly see a cross-section of their contexts - not the text of the individual comments, but the immediate neighborhood of the graphs in which they appear; and imagine further that as I applied selection criteria of various kinds to refine my graphs, their unique combination would itself form a metagraph which I could save at any time, like the key to a particular collection.
That last sounds a bit handwavey, but I'm imagining a fairly small graph that would map about the same amount of information as a regex string or polynomial expression. You wouldn't read the content of these graphs (unless you really wanted to) any more than you measure the ridges and notches of your most commonly used physical keys. They'll just become shapes you recognize and name to unlock your favorite perspectives, fulfilling much the same function as the extension buttons on your browser toolbar.
Taking the example above and imagining it extended to disks and documents as opposed to topics and comments
I like to think of it in terms of the real world objects the metaphor is meant to mimic. So I think of documents the way I would pieces of paper on my desk and control panels like light switches in my house (to borrow John Siracusa's example).
On the other hand, something like an address book or a filing cabinet full of tax records is not what I'm interested in organizing spatially. Instead, I'd use a purpose-built tool such as an address book application or document-oriented database. Likewise for photos or music, which lend themselves to custom database applications of their own.
I'm not sure what your treemap-like graph database would be optimized for, other than disk space cleanup tools (which I have used).
What I am looking for is something in the same ballpark as dynamic graph generation as seen here, but with shareable tagging: https://www.mcnutt.in/forum-explorer/
When you say their spatial orientations and groupings carried meaning for me I wholly agree; What I'm trying to say (poorly uwu) is that managing the finder or other WIMP desktop elements is like laying out a beautiful graph in Visio or some other flowcharting software, vs the sort of dynamic graphs that the computer can render for you on the fly.
Taking the example above and imagining it extended to disks and documents as opposed to topics and comments, suppose you could have nesting nodes, whose size might be a treemap-like function of their content and whose layout might be manged with Apollonian gaskets; and imagine further that I could click on the name of individual contributors (isomorphic to file properties or curated tags) and quickly see a cross-section of their contexts - not the text of the individual comments, but the immediate neighborhood of the graphs in which they appear; and imagine further that as I applied selection criteria of various kinds to refine my graphs, their unique combination would itself form a metagraph which I could save at any time, like the key to a particular collection.
That last sounds a bit handwavey, but I'm imagining a fairly small graph that would map about the same amount of information as a regex string or polynomial expression. You wouldn't read the content of these graphs (unless you really wanted to) any more than you measure the ridges and notches of your most commonly used physical keys. They'll just become shapes you recognize and name to unlock your favorite perspectives, fulfilling much the same function as the extension buttons on your browser toolbar.