Change the name of the "Library"

Feature Requests
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1

A library is defined as:

a collection of books and periodicals held in a library.
a room in a private house where books are kept.

In computing, library is defined as:

a collection of non-volatile resources used by computer programs, often for software development. (Wikipedia)

Library in Anytype is a collection of types and relations (and their datatype restrictions). So, it’s a very storage choice of label. What it should be called instead is schema. If not that, then ontology or vocabulary would do as well and maybe there are more options still better than

2

I don’t mind the use of Library but I’m not against it being changed if there is a better option. I don’t think those proposed solutions would be better though. Those seem even more confusing and out of place to me.

3

I really like “Library”. It is well in line with the terminology in other tools and it describes well a place for items that are available/reused space-wide.

4

Personally, I want the name of absolutely everything to be user-controllable. There’s no reason why the computer can’t keep track of multiple names for the same thing and who prefers which one, possibly by using objects and relations.

5

Please elaborate on why do you find the “out of place”

These are established standards and practices.

A popular example is https://schema.org
A database schema defines types and relations. We have XSD, JSON schema and so on.
IPLD uses “schema” as well. See IPLD ♦ Schemas

Regarding the use of “vocabulary”, see Linked Open Vocabularies

There are thousands of ontologies that define exactly that, classes and properties, and on top of that, they have axioms. Many are W3C standards like the time ontology Time Ontology in OWL. Quite a few companies use gist ontology gist - a minimalist upper ontology - The Semantic Arts Minimalist Upper Ontology . Many banks use the FIBO ontology https://spec.edmcouncil.org/fibo/ontology.

I’ve been working for almost 30 years in this area, and this is the first time I see a collection of types and relations referred to as “library”. Can you please point to another such example?

6

Can you please point me to these other tools?
(see my response to the previous comment)

7

Something that is a core part of the app should probably have one unified name for everyone.

8

Indeed. How can we talk about it otherwise?

9

While I think your name suggestions make sense for a power user or IT user. For the common Joe (like me) I have never even heared of those and they would confuse me a lot.

Library makes more sense.

I see (or think) you googled library definition and only picked the two that talk about books, while when you show more definitions it also shows:

  • a collection of books and periodicals held in a library.
  • a room in a private house where books are kept.
  • a series of books or recordings issued by a company as a set.
  • a collection of films, recorded music, etc., organized systematically and kept for research or borrowing.
  • a collection of programs and software packages made generally available, often loaded and stored on disk for immediate use.

So looking at the last two it makes perfectly sense to call it a library for sets and types.

10

A library, in any definition, including all you quoted, is a collection of concrete things (instances), and not abstract (their types, the way we classify them). So you do have a library in your Anytype space, it’s just not what it is currently called.

11

Sorry for writing too much, and a bit tangentially, but I think these are valid points, so bear with me:

The utility of any given word is derived from the ability of people to understand what it means. Generally speaking, in this context, it’s also preferable that the meaning be as clear as possible to the layman.

Anytype isn’t the greatest in that regard: anybody who uses the software for the first time needs to learn the jargon of object, type, template, relation, set, etc. It’s not terrible for geek types eager to use beta software, but jargon only adds complexity/confusion that could be avoided by using better terms. (Same goes for “entering the void”…)

As for “Library”, you’re probably correct in pointing out that the Anytype-meaning isn’t intuitive, but it’s not as if computer science lingo will help. In that regard, ontology and vocabulary are equally confusing for the layman.

What’s called a Library is more like a “tool library”, where you can find Type-objects that will serve different purposes/needs. The purpose of the Library, as I understand it, is to say to new users “see all the different things you can do with Anytpe”. So you want to collect recipes? And track movies you’ve watched? See, you can do it all with Anytype and it won’t turn into a giant mess. Each object has its relevant Type, and Types can be arranged in Sets, so your recipe won’t mix with the movie review. And then, of course, the other need for Library is to have a place to manage existing Types.

If that’s the case, other words that could replace Library are inventory and catalogue, but as single words neither clarify that’s where different Types are listed. So maybe “Type library”, “Type inventory”, or “All Types”? I’m not keen about “Set” either, but as long as that’s the word used in Anytype then the Library really is a "Type set" or “Set of Types”. Click on any Type object under “My Library” and you’ll get a set of objects of that Type. (Except that for some reason you can’t filter that set in My Library.)

And then there’s the Anytype Library which has it’s own issues (it should be “add”, not “install”, and you should be able to “remove” it in the Anytype Library without switching to My Library, etc. etc.)

There are other UX issues with the Library making it confusing, but I think a very basic thing would be to have each Type come with a ready-made template. If somebody would like to create an object of that type but start with a “blank” object, give them a button “clear template”. If a Type has multiple templates, apply automatically the one selected as default, and have a button “select template”. Finding where to select the default Type for new Objects is confusing as it is.

(And I’m not even going to go into how Layout is a template, but not a Template…)

12

@kvistgaard Other people in this thread have already summed up my thoughts but the issue is that your proposed terms are only intuitive if you have a computer science background which the majority of Anytype users do not.

I’d argue that Library is way more intuitive than schema or ontology and decently more intuitive than vocabulary. I have a bachelor’s degree in business marketing and management and while I’ve heard the first two words before, I’ve never once used them and had to look up the definitions.

As others have pointed out, words can have a common use or understanding beyond their recorded definitions. Library can be generally understood as a collection of ANYTHING at its base meaning. I don’t think it’s farfetched for people to understand what it means in this context.

13

For non-technical/non-specialist users, “ontology” and “schema” would have no meaning, and “vocabulary” would cause the same sort of confusion that you attribute to “library”.

Like others, I don’t object to a name change per se, but I think that all of these are worse.

14

Palette? This captures the concept of component types that can be assembled to create a assemblage.

15

Since it collects types of objects and types of relations, “Type library” sounds a bit better and but has the drawback of having two words instead of one.

16

Isn’t that over-associated with “command palette”?

18

(I apologize for the deleted message above, I failed to set up my reply correctly)

So I’m gonna gesture at all of the above from this post’s absolute position in the topic as evidence that we can’t talk about it anyway. Lots of people have made lots of suggestions that make sense to them, and they’ve provided rationales in support of their suggestion and against others.

I observe that different people from different backgrounds and involved in different communities all have their own preferences that, whatever they are, are mostly focused on talking with other people from that same background and from the same communities. Yes, people do communicate across boundaries, but when that happens they generally prefer to reach their own agreements rather than be forced into an agreement by third parties.

We already know how to handle multiple languages in user interfaces. This isn’t any different from that. Instead of just having English and Español we should have English (Mathematics), English (Library Science), English (Business); and Español (Matemáticas), Español (Bibliotecología), Español (Comercio). Of course that means many many more translations would be created, but organizing them wouldn’t be difficult. And we should let users clone language translations and make changes that are saved as part of a space so that they can share it amongst themselves, as well as easily compare different translations and receive notifications calling out updates to translations.

Now I’ll happily concede that this could make community support for Anytype harder, but at least at that point the user is more likely to have become invested in Anytype and will stick with it, rather than get fed up with trying to learn terms during onboarding that somebody else chose and that don’t make sense to them.

19

Tools like Tana are also not addressing users with a computer science background. And they even go a step further, using “supertag” instead of “type”. And yet, they use schema and users with no computer science background are very comfortable with it.

20

The Library is already divided into the Type Library and Relation Library.

21

Sure, this is in Asana. That’s the only one I use but I’ve seen “library” used in other tools

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