The DNE is geared around two fundamental components: NEs that provide information context and tiles that access information content. The NEs manage the structure of your information repository by letting you link anything to anything else, and by letting you maintain easily updated meta-data fields on everything in your repository. The tiles manage the content of your repository by letting you create easy links to whatever counts as a piece of information to you. This information can be in any medium, from a text document to a video clip, and it can be a file, a subdocument within a file, or a collection of files.
Tiles are composed of three parts:
1.
A piece of information in any medium. This can be a file, a subdocument within a file (e.g., a paragraph in a document), a collection of files, a link to a URL, etc.
2.
A link to one or more NEs. This means that any piece of information can be made accessible in any context in which it is valuable.
3.
A set of fixed and user-determined meta-data fields. This means you can easily keep notes on what the piece of information, how it is to be used and why.
Any piece of information that your computer can access can be saved as a tile in the DNE. The DNE does not have to create a copy of the source file in order to manage it - a tile can manage a link to information stored anywhere. Fields and NE links are managed within the DNE environment. Fields can be introduced, edited and viewed on the fly in order provide a brief, convenient and up to date account of each tile. The fields of a tile can be accessed and updated without playing the tile.
Information (whatever the medium) contained in tiles is accessed by playing the tile in the media player, and multimedia tiles can be edited in workrooms.
