You just need to rethink the form, which is also an inheritance from print media, as a possibly fuzzy dialogue. Incorporating multimodal input, extracting information from uploads, etc., is a huge accessibility win. This is totally achievable right now, it’s just a matter of viewing the "form" as an interaction designed to fulfill a predetermined goal. What actually complicates forms is handling conditions, state tracking, and synchronization, which can become arbitrarily complex. This sort of dynamic behavior can never be fully standardized. So special cases are always going to need special solutions.
> Hierarchical tree, Categories, tags and search.
I think it's important to highlight the distinction between exploration and retrieval. Tags and categories are perfect for powering indices and lists, enabling opinionated exploration interfaces. However, when it comes to open-ended retrieval, arbitrary conventions don't really help. Retrieval requires the searcher to have some prior information on patterns, which are media dependent.
To make the retrieval problem more manageable, information needs to be structured in a predictable manner. Patterns are powerful tools for enabling and enforcing memorization. For example, if I want to retrieve a specific academic paper, my search model will align with the typical information pattern of academic papers. This pattern encourages me to memorize key metadata, such as the publication year, author names, institutional affiliations, and keywords in the title. These elements form the standard metadata body for this type of content.
