Hi rodferna-ga,
I had hoped (and expected) to find one good link to provide you a
short, sweet answer to your question, but that didn't happen, so I'm
forced to actually think :-) This shouldn't be too difficult however,
since my computer experience goes back to MS-DOS days and includes
several years working with hierarchically-based, mainframe-oriented
DBMS. In other words, I've been immersed in hierarchical concepts for
25 years, so by now I should know why they are so useful.
Some hierarchical naming conventions, such as those of DOS/Windows,
start with the "highest" level to the left, and some, such as Internet
URL's show the highest level to the right of the name. But, which
direction hierarchical paths are designated is immaterial so long as
consistency is observed.
With some Internet assistance, I've come up with Eight Reasons
Hierarchical Naming Systems Are Advantageous:
1) they are an almost universal naming standard. Most people, with
a little DOS, Internet, or DBMS experience readily understand how
hierarchical naming systems work, so it's easy for people to
communicate effectively about file, website, and, sometimes, unique
record names and their locations and relationships;
2) they mimic human thought. We tend to break everything in life
down to a hierarchy, either "top-down" or "inverse", for easier
understanding. For instance, you live at an address on a street in a
city in a state in a country on a continent, etc., etc. Each ensuing
level of hierarchy encompasses more and more entities logically
"below" it;
3) hierarchical naming systems make locating individual files or
other computer locations, such as websites, much easier. If you know
something about a particular file, but you don't know it's precise
name, you can use the knowledge you have to go down a hierarchy using
what you know until you reach a point at which you have to simply
search for a likely name. That is much easier than if you had to find
an unclassified name on a list with tens of thousands of other names;
4) they make it easier to find groups of related files. For
instance, you might have all your digital photos in a folder/directory
called (predictably) "Digital Photos" within which you might have
sub-groups for "Family", "Pets", and so on. If you had to locate all
of your digital files on a computer without such a hierarchical
structure, your task would be much harder;
5) hierarchical naming systems make it possible to have more
concise individual filenames. In the absence of a hierarchical
structure, if you had to be descriptive enough to differentiate each
file on a computer or site on the Internet, many of the names would be
very long indeed, and would carry much redundant information;
6) they allow for much simpler security procedures. Instead of
having to designate what level of protection is required for each
individual file on a computer, a user/administrator can simply
designate security for whole folders/groups of related files, database
records, etc.;
7) in databases, hierarchies help limit index sizes. If, for
instance, you had a university directory organized in descending order
as school/professor/class/student, it takes much less overhead to
designate the associated school, professor, and class for each student
since each student record has only to point to the class record
logically "above" rather than all three associated records. In
contrast, relational databases are, by definition, more flexible in
their data associations than hierarchical DBMS's, but the processing
and storage overhead to support that flexibility can be much greater;
8) hierarchical structures make it much easier to avoid duplicate
names and their associated confusion. To be unique in a hierarchical
system, a filename only has to be unique within its hierarchical
"parent". In a "flat" structure on a typical computer, one would have
to devise tens of thousands of completely individualized names.
Here are some web references supporting the statements above ---
Preventing duplicate names:
http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/pipermail/squeak-dev/1999-July/019662.html
Symbolic links make the Unix file system non-hierarchical, resulting
in multiple valid path names for a given file. This ambiguity is a
source of confusion:
http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/sys/doc/lexnames.html
Domain name hierarchical standards:
http://imagi-net.com/hosting/dnsfaq.htm
I hope this thoroughly answers your question, but don't hesitate to
use the Clarify Answer button if anything is unclear.
Thanks for your question,
ericynot-ga
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