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From: john@thelonius.mitre.org (John D. Burger)
Newsgroups: comp.human-factors
Subject: Re: Thing Icon
Message-ID: <1991Jun21.192046.13627@linus.mitre.org>
Date: 21 Jun 91 19:20:46 GMT
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hammy@ctt.bellcore.com writes:

  Well, if I had to come up with such an icon, it would be a box ...

  Also, of course, what I have just described could represent "gift",
  "package", or any number of other "things".

Unfortunately, all of them physical in nature.

  Actually, I would expect that if you examined your application
  somewhat more carefully, you would realize that there are
  constraints imposed on the nature of "thing" by the application - I
  very much doubt that you really have a completely unconstrained
  choice here.  If you do, then maybe, as someone else suggested, the
  word "thing" would be better.

A system that I work on uses a KL-ONE-style knowledge representation.
At the top of the hierarchy is the node ROOT, which is meant to
subsume everything, and I mean everything, in the universe of
discourse.  ROOT directly subsumes the following nodes:

  SITUATION, e.g. states and events
  PROPERTY, e.g. the color or size of something
  ENTITY, e.g. people, information, and sets of things

Thus, ROOT really does represent a completely unconstrained thing,
even including very abstract things.  When we eventually build a
graphical editor for the hierarchy, I suspect we'll just use text for
the nodes, because I don't think it's possible to come up with icons
for PROPERTY or SITUATION, let alone ROOT.
--
John Burger                                               john@mitre.org

"You ever think about .signature files? I mean, do we really need them?"
  - alt.andy.rooney