RE: Another such tool: Re: [ba-ohs-talk] Mind mapping tool
At 11:14 AM 10/29/2002 +0100, Danny Ayers wrote:
> >> 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.
>
>Or for that matter with TouchGraph (as Alex modestly neglects to mention)
>:
>http://www.touchgraph.com/ (01)
Thanks Danny, no modesty here though. I am pretty confident that
TouchGraph should only be used when dealing with non-hierarchical or
multi-hierarchical data. Plain hierarchies would best be displayed with
other tools such as inxight or http://www.elastictech.com/html/demos.html (02)
However, on further experimentation with www.vivismo.com , I realized that
the tree view on the left (which is expandable) actually has some repeating
websites at the leaves, which would in fact make it a good candidate for
display with TG. (03)
>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). (04)
Speaking of Topic Maps, here is advanced notice about two TouchGraph based
tools that recently came out: (05)
http://www.tm4j.org/tmnav.html TMNav a topic map visualizer (Download a
usable demo from sourceforge )
http://kaon.semanticweb.org/Members/motik/oimodeller KAON Ontology Editor,
run java webstart demo from http://kaon.semanticweb.org/demos (06)
>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. (07)
Good link, and good to hear about the CMap's switch to XTM. (08)
--Alex (09)