Re: [TM4J-users] Ideas & Links: Topic Map Visualization

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Hi Bret 

thanks for your input. It will take me a while to browse the pages you
are suggesting :)

Some comments to your ideas for tmnav:

> Reducing Clutter
> - A control that makes it possible to fade out
>   (make the color progressively lighter) those
>    Topics which the user or programmer deams to
>    be less important
> 
- Assigning different colors depending on how
>   important a group of Topics is to the user
> 
> 
I agree that this is something that would be fine to have.

I see two problems:
a. How does a user tells tmnav how important a group of topics is to
him? 
b. Where is the information "This is of importance x", is stored.

I think the answer to a) is that the user wants to define some
expression in terms of topic map objects (as opposed to an expression
that describes graph-structures of an AbstractModel). So it should be
something like "All Topics of type t1 are important" or much more
flexible "All topics that are returned by this TologQuery tq are of
minor importance".

This would imply that the abstractor has to compute the importance of
the nodes of the model (and not the renderer) and stores it within the
model. Which in turn means, that we need some new properties for arcs
and nodes. Which is the answer to b).

Since some time I'm thinking about an extension to the abstract model,
which would allow the expression of a 'weight' of an arc or a node.  I
called this "weighted model" for myself. The basic idea is, that every
arc and node gets a new property "weight" (expressed as an Integer).
Furthermore we could store for each container (an arc is the container
for its endnodes and a node is a container for its incoming and outgoing
arcs) the range, in which the weights of its members live.

This would be suitable to express your concept of importance, wouldn't
it?

>- Allow for zooming
>
Yeah. FishEye-Lens would be even better. It could magnify a circular
area centered around your cursor while you are moving over the
hypergraph. I once googled for fisheye implementations, but I forget
what the result was. Nevertheless it shouldn't been to hard to
implement. Time...

> - Display different hypergraphs at the same time,
>   each showing more or less complexity,
>   with arcs linking some of the Topics in the
>   higher level hypergraph with lower-level
>   hypergraphs
>

Would it be enough to have a model with an invisible root (or more
generally being able to hide nodes, not only the root nodes)? By using a
distinct Gestalt-Type which should be recognized by the renderers

> Interactivity
> - Allow the user to make changes in the hypergraph
>   When the user decides to save the changes,
>   an application in the background converts the
>   changes into changes in the TopicMap
> 
Yes. Sorry. I don't think that I will implement something like this.
This does not mean, that I think it shouldn't been implemented at all,
but 
a. this is a lot of work. really. And I feel, that I have too many open
projects to step into another one. But if 
someone volunteers I would be more than glad about.

b. personally to me it seems much more effective, to harvest topic maps
from exisiting data than to handcraft it. It would be fine being able to
quick change something in a map that you are currently browsing, but
this is not my major concern currently. 

But as I said before, if somene is willing to do it, I will give him any
help that I can. (Apart from coding :))

Ok. I have to rush and get the kid.
bye
c

Am Mo, den 23.08.2004 schrieb Bret Cohen um 22:31:
> Hi Christoph,
> 
> You already know about my application & needs,
> but I did some thinking & Internet searching
> on broader topics & the results are attached
> 
> Bret
> ________________________________________________
> From: Christoph Froehlich <cf...@fo...>
> To: "tm4...@li..." 
> <tm4...@li...>
> Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2004 13:11:23 +0200
> Subject: [TM4J-users] Spatial relationships
> 
> HI 
> 
> I'm thinking about adding an abstractor/renderer-pair
> to
> panckoucke/tmnav that will be specialized on
> displaying spatial
> relationships between topics.
> 
> If some of you is using topicmaps to express spatial
> relationships and
> is interested in a display engine for them, I would be
> glad to learn 
> how
> you're modeling them.
> 
> Me myself, I'm working right now on a topic map that
> uses simple
> wgs84-latitude and longitude coordinates as
> occurrences of topics to
> express geographical location.
> 
> I would like to learn what modeling strategies others
> use or what you
> expect from a "spatial renderer" in order to come up
> with a hopefully
> rather generic solution for panckoucke/tmnav
>  
> Thanks 
> Christoph
> 
> 
> 
> 		
> _______________________________
> Do you Yahoo!?
> Win 1 of 4,000 free domain names from Yahoo! Enter now.
> http://promotions.yahoo.com/goldrush
> 
> ______________________________________________________________________
> IDEAS & LINKS FOR TOPIC MAP VISUALIZATION
> 
> The following ideas don't relate exactly to my
> current TM4J application, which Christoph already
> knows about.
> 
> _________________________________________________
> 
> Ideas:
> 
> Reducing Clutter
> - A control that makes it possible to fade out
>   (make the color progressively lighter) those
>    Topics which the user or programmer deams to
>    be less important
> 
> - Assigning different colors depending on how
>   important a group of Topics is to the user
> 
> - Allow for zooming
> 
> - Display different hypergraphs at the same time,
>   each showing more or less complexity,
>   with arcs linking some of the Topics in the
>   higher level hypergraph with lower-level
>   hypergraphs
> 
> Interactivity
> - Allow the user to make changes in the hypergraph
>   When the user decides to save the changes,
>   an application in the background converts the
>   changes into changes in the TopicMap
> 
> ________________________________________________
> 
> Topic Map Applications: (See also links below)
> 
> Jack Park's idea (XTM Topic Maps) of
> using topic maps to represent concept maps
> or "mind maps"
> 
> When I trained to teach English to foreigners
> the trainer had us create a "mind map" of a
> theme, showing arcs connecting the theme with
> activities, vocabulary, grammar points, etc.
> This could be extended with topic map occurrances
> that point to resources on the Internet
> (teaching activities, vocabulary definition,
> songs & literature showing applications of
> grammar points, vocabulary, & cultural concepts)
> 
> Note: I'm currently in Brazil, learning Portuguese
> while I do my final projects, and most of what
> I've learned about Portuguese comes from Brazilian
> songs. I sometimes think about creating a topic map
> application that helps Portuguese teachers to use
> songs in their teaching, and links the songs to 
> vocabulary words & definitions, commentaries on
> the music, references to other songs or events
> that are made within the songs, etc.
> 
> Other educational applications involve
> creating "learning objects" that teachers
> insert into lesson plans, or students can
> use for self-study. A good visualization
> would show how the concepts in the field
> are related to each other, and show
> "occcurrences" on the Internet
> 
> ________________________________________________
> 
> Internet Links:
> 
> BOOKS:
> XTM Topic Maps (chapters by Jack Park & by his children
> - on a multi-level hypergraph based on topic maps
>   that contain topics refering to other topic maps
> <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201749602/102-5470435-7298555>
> 
> Visualizing the Semantic Web
> <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1852335769/ref=pd_sim_books_1/102-5470435-7298555?v=glance&s=books>
> - contains lots of interesting chapters
> 
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> GOOD CONTACT PERSON - Benedicte Le Grande: Ben...@li... 
> http://www-rp.lip6.fr/~blegrand
> 
> <http://www.gca.org/papers/xmleurope2000/author/s29-03auth1.html>
> Articles by Le Grande:
>  Information management - Topic Maps visualization 
> <http://www.gca.org/papers/xmleurope2000/papers/s29-03.html>
> Topic Maps Visualization:
> <http://www-rp.lip6.fr/site_npa/site_rp/_publications/245-legrand3.PDF>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> OTHER INTERNET LINKS:
> If you haven't seen it already, there is also a page of Topic Map
> links that contains a section of Visualization links
>  (including the Le Grande/Soto article)
> <http://www.garshol.priv.no/download/tmlinks.html>
> 
> Here's an article on using SVG for topic map visualization
> applied to the Europiean OmniPaper project :
> "investigating techniques to obtain a novel online news experience"
> <http://portal.cid.unb.br/elpub/viewpaper.php?id=29&print=1>
> 
> 2D Visualization in the Knowledge Management Research Projects KM-Portal & Kam.sys
> <http://www.igd.fraunhofer.de/igd-a6/competencies/km2d/km-portal2d.html>
> - a 2D topic map viewer
> 
> SUPPORTING INFORMATION VISUALIZATION THROUGH TOPIC MAPS
> <http://www.ccg.pt/Publications/_PDFs/Publications/2002/Artigo_TM_ICTE02_final.pdf>
> - Topic Maps and 3D Virtual Reality
> 
>  
> LEO: A Concept Map-Based Course Visualization Tool
> for Instructors and Students - abstract
> <http://www.iwm-kmrc.de/workshops/visual_artifacts/downloads/abstracts/coffey.pdf>
> 
> Articulating conceptual spaces using the Topic Map standard
> <http://www.idealliance.org/papers/xml02/dx_xml02/papers/06-03-02/06-03-02.html>
> 
> EduNuggets: An Intelligent Repository for Multimedia Educational Materials 
> <http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~stroulia/EduNuggets/> - includes using
> topic maps for visualization
> 
> - Information Architecture and Reading the Digital Domain -
> - contains a bunch of links to interesting information visualization projects
> 
> Information Visualization Links:
> <http://www.1000dictionaries.com/opendir/index.php?browse=/Reference/Knowledge_Management/Knowledge_Discovery/Information_Visualization/>
-- 
Christoph Froehlich <cf...@fo...>