[topicmapmail] An Idea about TopicMap intelligent views

[Thomas B. Passin]

Stefan Lischke wrote:

  > 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.
> 
> ...
> 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.

One potential problem with traversals is that a user is likely to 
stumble onto the information he wants with some luck, after a number of 
false starts.  You wouldn't necessarily want to use such a trace the way 
you are picturing.

I have been getting interested in another approach, which is on-the-fly 
clustering, similar to the clustering presented by sites like Vivisimo, 
iBoogie, Mooter, or Kartoo.  This is typically  done using the snippets 
of text returned by search engines.  The clusters reflect the actual 
search results, and not pre-defined categories, although those can be 
worked in.

I am beginning to experiment with clustering in my topic map bookmark 
assistant, and hope to be able to have a late-breaking paper on it for 
Extreme.  In the meantime, on-the-fly clustering is hard but looks 
promising.

With the bookmark assistant, the clustering would be done using the 
titles of bookmarks.  It is interesting to wonder what information could 
be used in a more general topic map.

Cheers,

Tom P