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HyperFilter (temporary name)⚓︎

Introduction⚓︎

Traditional cataloguing systems and search tools were not designed to deal with the type and amount of information we produce nowadays. They're already struggling to keep up and desperately need to be improved in order to remain useful.

The idea behind HyperFilter is to create a comprehensive database of entities of any kind -anything from movies, books, games to historical events, vehicles, plants- and compile their attributes, gathered from a selection of reliable sources, into a cohesive network.

Much like other cataloguing systems, HyperFilter will include basic properties you would expect, i.e. title, author and edition for a book. Likewise, it will make use of tags for genres, themes and topics, but going a step further by incorporating much more detailed and nuanced ones such as character archetypes, symbols, specific locations and time periods.

This tagging system ensures that much more information is uniform and itemized in a way that makes it possible to do complex searches. For example: books set in the Victorian era that mention a particular city or all instances of one car model in all media released in the year 1975.

With HyperFilter, users would be able to find connections and draw comparisons between entities, index and classify relevant data, explore and discover new items that align with their interests, making it an invaluable tool for researchers, hobbyists and enthusiasts.

Design pillars⚓︎

  • Offer a community-curated catalogue of resources covering as many areas as possible, helped by custom tools to be kept concise and on-point.

  • The user must always be able to choose exactly how the data is filtered and presented. No advertisements, no sponsored results.

  • Advanced users are the primary intended audience.

Goals⚓︎

Planned features⚓︎

  • A universal list of entities, grouped by broad categories.

  • Each entity has a list of "hypertags", which represent attributes or logical connections to other related entities.

  • When initially inserted (either automatically by our system, or if triggered by a user), "crawlers" will try to fill up as much data as possible for that entity. Those are programs that run on our servers and are specialized to extract specific types of data each. For example, one crawler could be used to fetch data about a car from available sources. Another would deal with books or movies or plants or recipes and so on...

  • Once past that initialization phase, users can then request for hypertags to be added, modified or deleted. The system uses privileges and votes in a way similar to StackOverflow.

  • Lists, collections and custom searches can be created and customized by the users. The most important ones are provided by default.

  • Users can have different templates to use the services, based on what they need at that particular moment. Templates are fully customizable.

  • Personal, private notes can be attached to entities.

  • Communities can curate lists and collections.

  • User profile split into multiple personas.

Big list of all things (BLOAT)⚓︎

Hypertag system⚓︎

Potential issues⚓︎

  • Mass-upvoting or downvoting of tags to "send a message"

Plea for help⚓︎

What I would appreciate the most, right now, is your feedback. Feel free to join the project's Discord server where the discussion takes place.