Where's my stuff?

Everybody knows that something is wrong.

What is wrong is that I can't find my stuff. I know I put it in a folder somewhere, but I don't know which folder I put it in. I didn't have an apposite folder at the time, so I created one; but now I'm not sure what I was thinking when I created it.

I think my stuff was red. I have a folder for red things, but my stuff isn't in there. That folder is just for things that are red and don't belong anywhere else.

I'm pretty sure my stuff was round. I do have folders for round things. More precisely, I have about a hundred folders for round things, because my things are either round, square, or wobbly—and so that's my lowest level classification. Once I lost a thing for weeks because it was kind of square and kind of wobbly and I forgot what I finally called it.

The last time I couldn't find my stuff I decided to start over with tags. Folders are great, but they're very strict: either it's in one folder or another. Tags are promiscuous: you can have as many as you want attached to a thing. Tags, apparently, are the next big thing. But I gave up when I couldn't find some music, some classical music in particular. I had tags for romantic music, baroque music, 40 part choral works, and about a hundred other kinds of classical music, but I couldn't remember which it was, and I couldn't find it because there were too many.

Someone once persuaded me to put all my stuff in a relational database. The less said about that episode, the better.

What is needed is some kind of hybrid folder/tags system, in which things have more than one categorisation, but things—and their categorisations—are potentially hierarchical. Maybe semantic networks are the answer.