Appellation/Name Discussion
This is exactly what I ended up doing with guidance from @Chr1sG (see Siblings as children of parents filter). However, it seems rather hacky to me, partly due to some limitations of formulas and need for a few intermediary fields. How this looks in the fibery UI also leaves a lot to be desired (I know the new layout will greatly improve this):
But I also feel I need to be able to this more universally/consistently for more entities such as places, people, etc. rather one by one for each type. As @Oshyan said, this is both a data structure and UI challenge.
Date/Time Discussion
I think that time/date requires more in-depth attention particularly if we are talking about knowledge management but agree that a separate object might not be the answer. I think almost all systems out there try to define dates in very specific and rigid terms which makes representing fuzzy dates like “August 1962”, “Autumn 1720”, “1955 - 1957”, “1920’s”, “17th century”, etc. impossible. You end up either having to use text/string fields where you lose all sense (and control) of the fact this is actually temporal data or have adopt a set of standards/conventions to work within the constraints of how the system represents dates/time. For examples, you can adopt a convention that all month-type dates like “August 1962” would be represented as the first day of the month “1962-08-01” or a range between first and last day of that month. But I feel that takes away from what we intuitively know is a less precise definition than the actual range between first and last day of that particular month. I think that becomes more acute as the time horizon becomes longer. This may be an academic point but I think it is worthwhile to think about it at some point particularly when you are talking about managing “knowledge”.
Arches (a GIS based data system for historic sites management) uses EDTF to address this which seems like an interesting solution. It accompanies this with a time wheel UI component that makes navigating the date easier and more intuitive (see this short demonstration).
Fuzzy Data & Uncertainty
I think we will eventually have to deal with representing uncertainty in many areas of our data (particularly structured data). For example, when we record numerical values as integer/double fields, in many cases we are masking/losing the inherent uncertainty of these values/measurements, even if the uncertainty is well understood or measured prior to the data entering into the system. As far as I’ve seen, there is currently no means of representing this uncertainty/probabilistic nature of the data in mainstream databases and apps and unless there are descriptive/free-text fields associated with the record to describe the uncertainty, other users are going to totally miss this. Even if a description or explanation exists, it doesn’t really help with tracking of uncertainties and cumulative error as the data is aggregated/used in future calculations.
By the way, this is not just reserved to numerical values but also is a big issue in geospatial data, among others.
Possible Solution
I am not bright and experienced enough to come up with concrete solutions. However, I wonder if having the ability to build more complex or compound data types is the answer. I know this can be accomplished more or less in fibery by building new types and establishing relations, but to me defining a fuzzy numeric value as a totally separate entity/object seems really bizarre and clunky particularly because you need to create the new entity, open it, fill a bunch of fields and then return to the original record. I think being able to construct compound types from a series of fundamental/basic data types which can then be used across the system with a consistent data entry UI would be very helpful in this regard.
I am hopeful that the extensions fields (workflow, avatar, etc.) will eventually allow this functionality.
Apologies for another long, rambling and probably unhelpful post. I am hoping that by writing these things down, the bright folks here can come up with some interesting ways of addressing these for the masses.