[topicmapmail] Wiki/WebLog application built on top of topicmaps...

[Guy Murphy]

No you haven't misunderstood at all Anthony, and to a degree you're right,
one could indeed manage the filtering of the links in that manner.

Firstly some days I wish I'd implemented Associations as Topics, and other
days I'm damn glad I didn't... both are nodes, but both [in Conclave]
inhabit different universes, and while I could make associations addressable
as topics my concern is that it would confuse users... I swap between the
two positions, and it's really another topic for discussion.

While what you suggest will filter the links it wont really filter them in
any manner that changing one participants role from "topic" to "blind-topic"
wont, and it adds and extra association to manage... and that's the crux of
the issue... with your suggestion the user would still be left with a couple
of hundred "hidden-because-user-is-not-interested" associations to manage,
and I'm still going to be left hiding those associations as a special case
and left deciding how to manage them as a special case.

We're still left with under the topicmap model being constrained to
acknowledge a relationship going in both directions... and while I agree at
a philisophical level this is an accurate modelling of a relationship...
each participant does indeed have a role... practically it causes problems.

What I've been thinking of is making Associations optionally directional.
The Associations in Conclave can have metadata added as part of their model,
so it would be reasonably easy to add a "starting-point" piece of metadata
to an association, allowing me to filter participants from display on a
general rather than specific principal.... From a usability point of view
when doing things like editing or creating topics the user can select a
"track topic" box to make the association bi-directional, and therefore have
it displayed to them from their own personal topic.

Thanks heaps for your comment though, it's what got me thinking about
indicating directional associations (which I should have though of before).

Cheers,
    Guy.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Anthony B. Coates" <abcoates@TheOffice.net>
To: "Guy Murphy" <guy.murphy@easynet.co.uk>; <topicmapmail@infoloom.com>
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 11:31 AM
Subject: Re: [topicmapmail] Wiki/WebLog application built on top of
topicmaps...


> ** Reply to message from "Guy Murphy" <guy.murphy@easynet.co.uk> on Wed,
15 Jan
> 2003 10:02:12 -0000
>
> Dear Guy,
>
> > Now 100 topic creations later, each topic that's created has a single
highly
> > useful link by virtue of the "created" association to the user that
created
> > it... the user on the other hand has 100 "created" associations from
their
> > topic, 95 of which they aren't remotely interested in.... Now I'm aware
that
> > others might be interested in what topics a user has created, but I'm
> > looking to fulfil pragmatic user requirements not purity of form.
>
> In terms of pure implementation, bi-directional links aren't much harder
than
> omni-directional links.  If you had implemented associations as topics,
you
> could have associated the uninteresting links with a
> "hidden-because-user-is-not-interested" topic, and filtered them out of
the
> user's interface that way.  Would that not solve the problem, or have I
> misunderstood?
>
> Cheers,
> Tony.
> ====
> Anthony B. Coates, Information & Software Architect
> mailto:abcoates@TheOffice.net
> MDDL Editor (Market Data Definition Language)
> http://www.mddl.org/
> FpML AWG Member (Financial Products Markup Language)
> http://www.fpml.org/
> _______________________________________________
> topicmapmail mailing list
> topicmapmail@infoloom.com
> http://www.infoloom.com/mailman/listinfo/topicmapmail
>