# Discovering Emergent Structure

Many Tinderbox documents are meant for use over a span of months or years, changing frequently as you add and organize information. As your understanding grows, and as your needs change, you are bound to uncover new aspects of your work that you wish to record. Some facets that you originally captured only occasionally and informally will often take on greater importance. Some concepts you originally thought useful will turn out to be less relevant than you expected.

Over time, you may create new attributes to describe them and new agents and actions to take advantage of those attributes. This process is the discovery of emergent structure.

Like a conventional database, Tinderbox can handle lots of information, more information, indeed, than you might wish to memorize. Databases, however, are most effective when they are well structured from the beginning; they retrieve things quickly but make it hard to reorganize. Tinderbox is designed to facilitate reorganization. You do not need to get the structure right at first, and in fact you shouldn’t try.

### The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work

Tinderbox beginners are sometimes tempted to invest lots of time at the start of a project, designing elaborate networks of agents and rules. Experience generally shows, however, that it’s best to keep things simple at the outset. In the early stages, you’ll have fewer notes, and you can experiment easily. Take advantage of that freedom as your work gathers way, adding and changing structure as you discover new relationships.

Of course, you may immediately recognize the usefulness of some kinds of information, and in that case you may want to create some relevant user attributes and prototypes. If you are researching the history a schoolteachers in frontier Wyoming, you’re bound to want prototypes for Teachers and for Schools, as well as prototypes for reference sources and for places. You might well want to create an attribute to hold the name of the $School at which a person taught.

Later, you might want to add more attributes; Tinderbox lets you add attributes whenever you like. Often, you’ll initially record information in the text of each note, and later you’ll move specific facts to appropriate attributes. This is neither difficult or onerous. Conversely, if you require yourself to fill in a long list of metadata whenever you add a new note, you may be tempted to delay making a note entirely until you’re confident the work is justified.

Experience suggests it’s best to record a simple note than to skip making the note entirely. Simple notes don’t take much time, and you can always delete them if they prove not to be relevant to your work.