[topicmapmail] An Idea about TopicMap intelligent views

[Murray Altheim]

Stefan Lischke wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> Yesterday i discussed an old idea with a friend, and i want to know what 
> you think about it, if this is an old idea or if you have further ideas.
> 
> Imagine we use a graphical TopicMap Viewer to view a really big 
> TopicMap. My main goal is to avoid to much Topics to be shown at once so 
> the user doesn't get crazy.
> 
> The TopicMap has a topic "hungry" the user clicks on it and see other 
> topics associated with this topic.
> The User clicks on the associated Topic "order".
> Usually there will popup hundreds of topics which are associated with 
> "order" for example books, houses, cars and so on.
> 
> Now the idea comes into play.
> The way the user traversed the TopicMap affects the view of the topics.
> 
> So the user clicked on "hungry" first and then on "order", cause of 
> metadata there arent books or houses displayed. There are just the 
> things displayed which one can eat, which was speciefied by first click 
> on hungry.
> 
> So the user traverse like:
> hungry->order->pizza
> 
> I know this example may lack but i hope the main idea, that the 
> traversal of the topicmap affects the view of the further traversal.

Stefan,

It's a good enough idea that it's been done. Alex Shapiro's
TouchGraph visualization toolkit uses a feature called
"locality" that only displays a certain number of nodes from
the selected node in the graph.

I use an extended version of TouchGraph in Ceryle, where I
might be viewing a Topic Map composed of four or five hundred
Topics, but I'm only looking at say, a dozen at a time.

TouchGraph is at:  http://sourceforge.net/projects/touchgraph

There are probably a number of ways to do this, but they'll
all be based on concepts similar to locality, sorta like being
in a particular aisle in a library.

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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