[topic_maps] Re: [topicmapmail] Multiple members in XTM associations

[Murray Altheim]

Lars Marius Garshol wrote:
> * Jens Kanschik
> |
> | I indeed considered to use TM4J and using it would certainly be
> | better, but at the moment I would like to write an applet which
> | means I have to be careful to keep the size small. Even though the
> | bandwidth increases all the time, I don't like it if the user has to
> | wait until half a MB has been transfered.
> 
> That makes sense. I can see why you'd want to do this, though this
> will definitely increase the amount of work necessary. Unfortunately,
> an XTM interpreter is a non-trivial thing to write.
>  
> | I was a bit inexact, actually I will use really a graph layout and
> | don't want to restrict myself to trees. Of course one has to think
> | carefully about how to show constructs like n-ary associations (one
> | node for the assoc.  which is linked to all members), scoping (using
> | different colors/styles) etc., but I think the relationship between
> | TMs and graphs is close enough to give it a try.
> 
> Worth a try it most certainly is. I'd be very interested to see your
> results, so I hope you report back here when you have some.

A great deal of the functionality of what you're trying to accomplish
I've implemented in Ceryle. But as you indicate, even TM4J is a bit
much to download, and the number of jar files to support TM4J are
even larger than it is (this is true of a lot of applications, of
course).

But it does seem a shame to reinvent the wheel where that's not
necessary, and I might suggest using the same graph visualization
toolkit that I did, TouchGraph. I've heavily extended TouchGraph
(TG) for use in Ceryle, but Alex Shapiro, TG's author, designed
it to be used also as an applet, and you could perhaps extend it
slightly (well, as much as necessary), and use it rather then
develop your own. In Ceryle, for example, if you turn up the
hyperbolic distortion all the way (something available in TG but
not implemented in its demo), turn on auto-centering (something
I had to create using a Thread to tweak the centering of the
selected node on a periodic basis), well, you have something even
more powerful than what I've seen of HyperGraph given the use of
zoom, rotate and locality lenses. I think Alex is to be commended
on creating a very functional toolkit, and a number of projects
have taken advantage of it.

As for some sort of XTM processor, a lightweight one that did
most of what TM4J does would be very cool, though in looking at
TM4J I don't know what you could trim, apart from not having the
storage backends (i.e., doing everything in memory), and perhaps
dumping the utility classes. Perhaps you could try to take a copy
of TM4J and doing something like that to see how small you could
make it, rather than building it up from scratch. As a contributor
to Kal's project I know its code pretty well, and as Lars Marius
says, it's non-trivial (which is putting it mildly).

You can find more information about TouchGraph at:

    http://touchgraph.sourceforge.net/

Murray

......................................................................
Murray Altheim                    http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/murray/
Knowledge Media Institute
The Open University, Milton Keynes, Bucks, MK7 6AA, UK               .

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