Forest and Trees

In a comment to jrittenhouse, I mentioned that I was considering revising the Keyword system in my library database. I think I've decided how I want to do this.

The method is loosely based on - no, let's say "inspired by" - the Colon Classification system of S. R. Ranganathan. I'll set up a Keywords table, with fields "ID", "Tree", "Parent", and "Keyword". As this suggests, the keywords will be arranged into a number of disjoint trees, and any given work can be assigned words from any appropriate trees.

So, for example, Romeo and Juliet could be assigned the following:

• Genre > Drama > Tragedy
• Location > Europe > England
• Time > Renaissance > 16th Century
• Setting > Place > Europe > Italy > Mantua
• Setting > Time > Renaissance
• Plot > Romance > Doomed Romance
• Plot > Politics > Vendetta

One form will display the title of a work and a listbox allowing me to navigate the keyword trees and assign them to the works. Another will display a keyword node and list its children and the works that have it as a keyword. The "Works" form will be adjusted to display the keywords for the given work in a subform whose records will name the tree and the final node (so "Genre: Tragedy", "Location: England", "Time: 16th Century", and so on).

Ordinologist, remember?

Trees in Access

Does anyone know how to implement a tree structure in Access?

As I mentioned, I want to organize my keywords into a tree, so that (e.g.) the keyword "Location" has children such as "Europe", "Asia", etc., and "Europe" in turn has children "Ireland", "Great Britain", and so on. It seems that the obvious way to do this is to have each Keyword record have a "Parent" field, containing the ID of the parent keyword.

So far, so good. I want to construct a form which will show a keyword and a list of its children, and which will allow me to add more children to that list. Thus far, I haven't been able to get the latter to work. Any ideas? ("Use a different database program" will be considered only as a last resort....)

Ain't It the Truth?

Geoff Nunberg delivers an interesting discussion of the subtleties of the use of the word "ain't", giving reason to expect that word to continue to hang on the edge of respectability.