RE: Another such tool: Re: [ba-ohs-talk] Mind mapping tool
>Thanks. I read about something called "Grokker" last
>night, too. Any word on that?
>
>Alex Shapiro wrote:
>
>> Here is some more info about Groxis
>> http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/27/technology/27SOFT.html
>> http://slashdot.org/articles/02/10/27/192225.shtml?tid=95
>>
>> So far I haven't found any info to impress me. It seems that all they do
>> it take cluster suggestions such as those returned by www.vivismo.com and
>> form a hierarchical map out of them. The problem with hierarchical views
>> is that they don't give you a sense of how an item could fall
>into multiple
>> categories. This same data could have been rendered using Inxight's star
>> tree. (01)
Or for that matter with TouchGraph (as Alex modestly neglects to mention)
:
http://www.touchgraph.com/ (02)
I agree with Alex's point about the limitations of hierachical views, and
it's a common drawback to virtually all the 'mindmapper' type tools,
whatever their subject matter. For such tools to become *really* useful, in
my opinion they will need to have at least two fundamental characteristics :
a (node & arc) graph based model; a globally interoperable data format.
There appear to be two major alternatives available for the model/format -
XML Topic Maps (XTM) and Resource Description Framework (RDF). (I'm
currently working on a tool of this type primarily using the latter). (03)
I'm sure that this has already been noted, but just for the record there's
also the CMapTools tool :
http://cmap.coginst.uwf.edu/
which is already in very widespread use in schools etc, and from what I
gather has until recently been using a proprietary format for data
interchange, but will in the near future use XTM. (04)
Cheers,
Danny. (05)
-----------
Danny Ayers (06)
Idea maps for the Semantic Web
http://ideagraph.net (07)
<stuff> http://www.isacat.net </stuff> (08)
Semantic Web Log :
http://www.citnames.com/blog (09)