Re: [Tm4j-developers] TMNav

[Kal A. <ka...@te...>]

On Thursday 18 July 2002 09:16, Christoph Fr=F6hlich wrote:
> Hi  kal,
>
> thanks for your analysis, with wich I agree completely
>
> I was busy over the last weeks and this will last until end of july,
> but in august I will find some time to proceed developing tmnav. I
> would be glad to contribute to [5: lib] and since I am becoming an
> eclipse addict,  I would like to work on [3: Eclipse plugin]
>

That would be great ! If we try and develop the stand-alone app and the t=
wo=20
plugins in parallel with the lib, we should get a good spread of requirem=
ents=20
for the library and have a good chance of making something truly reusable=
=2E

> When working on the prototype I stopped at a point, where two major tas=
k
> arose. Since these tasks live at the very core of [5:lib], I will brief=
ly
> mention them.
>
> Firstly:
>   [5:lib] should support visualisation in different levels-of-detail.
> A very detailed level may show everything down to the single
> xml-elements, while a higher-level approach would summarize
> information and provide something which resembles more an overview.
> We talked about this before.
>
> I will call this process the "summarization".
>
> Summarization may leed to a model, where particular elements do not
> necessarily correspond directly to TopicMapElements. In fact some
> summarization-Elements will represent collections of topicMap
> Elements while other may symbolise constructs which are not even
> contained in the underlying map.
> (Summarization will always be an interpretation, which may include
> the wish to add helper constructs)
>
>   So secondly, we need a model
> - which is the result of the summarisation-process and
> - which has a very loose binding to the TopicMap-Model
> - which is flexible enough to represent different degrees of visualisat=
ion
> and - which is implementation independant.
> I think, this will lead us to some abstract graph-model. So far so good=
=2E
>
> But now it's getting diffcult.
> There comes a time when we want the user to be able to interact with ou=
r
> app. Perhaps he wants to delete the relation "all operas" from "compose=
r
> verdi".
>
> This means we must traverse the Summarization model back to the
> TopicMap-Model, in order to identify all TopicMap-Elements which are
> affected by this operation.  This is something like de-summarisation.
> It would be easy for isolated tasks, like deleting. But we need a
> more general approach, in order to enable developpers of using
> [5:lib] in a way, that we haven't had in mind, when implementing
> [5:lib].
> This sounds difficult to me.
>

I too can see the need for topic map summarization, but I think that the =
topic=20
map structures can be used to do this. I am thinking that you could use t=
he=20
summarization method to turn a big topic map (with all of its detail) int=
o a=20
smaller topic map (where connections between topics are some sort of gene=
ric=20
"is-related-to" association). The smaller topic map could use subject=20
indicators which point to the resourceLocator addresses of the topics in =
the=20
detailed topic map. If a topic is a summary of a group of topics, then it=
=20
could either use subject indicators or perhaps occurrences to point to al=
l of=20
the topics that it summarizes. I saw a great presentation at XML 2001 on =
a=20
method for statistical analysis of topic maps to do this sort of=20
summarization work - the method could even be applied repeatedly to creat=
e a=20
summary of a summary and so on...this gave the ability to generate multip=
le=20
"scales" of navigation which the user could zooom in and out of. Its a re=
ally=20
cool idea - although a bit computationally expensive, so it might be the =
kind=20
of thing that you preprocess (and then store all of the different levels =
of=20
view as separate topic maps).=20

To me, keeping the summary in topic map form makes a lot of sense - that =
way=20
we can use the same navigation code and present the same look-and-feel to=
 the=20
end user regardless of the level at which he/she is navigating the topic =
map.

And is anybody up for doing the 3D-fly-throught version ? ;-)

>
> Puh. Sorry, if this kind of discussion is a bit off topic on this list.
>

Not at all - topic map summarization is a great thing for us to discuss o=
n=20
this list. If anyone has any ideas or pointers to other statistical metho=
ds=20
that could be applied, please share them!

> What I wanted to say is I would like to contribute to tmnav.
>

YAY! You will be most welcome to!

Cheers,

Kal