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

[harald k. <sc...@ma...>]

Hi Bret,

i do not know your application but I read through your ideas and want to 
add some things which I think could be important.

> 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


would you like to connect  this with assigning colors (so the user marks 
the ones he or she deems important and the clutter changes the shades) 
or would you
like to create some automatic importance ranking
e.g. depending on
-> is the topic used for typing
-> how many assocs a topic participates in
-> how much information does a Topic Have


>- Assigning different colors depending on how

>  important a group of Topics is to the user




>- Allow for zooming


I already thought about that:
there are IMHO two ways:
-> add zooming to the renderer
-> add general zooming (using some kind of zooming panel e.g. like a 
scrolling panel)
i found a project / framework (there are actually two, jazz, the old one 
and a new implementation called piccolo)
which has such a component but was never able to have a closer look
both can be found at
 http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/jazz/


> - 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


displaying different coponents with different content and then beeing 
able to zoom into some of them was a feature of
this framewor (they e.g. used it for photo software)


 > 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

Some time ago (seems like ages) I meet with Christoph and Niko in 
Hamburg where we also talked about this. My suggestions was to cerate 
something called (after a suggestion on this list) Concretizer. I played 
around with this and my impression was, that the best way to do this is 
to create a Special concretizer for every abstractor we use. The 
Concretizer should be some kind of reverse function to the Abstractor. 
If a Model created by the CompactAbstractor is converted to a TopicMap 
with the CompactConcretizer, their canonical forms should be equals. 
Also, this would enable us to create different Conversion Processes for 
different needs and also reduce the complexity of the problem. By 
creating a node, selecting a gestalt and giving a label, there should be 
enough information to extend a TopicMap. I will lookm though my stuff 
wether i still have my experimental code but i have doubt about that 
(was on my old computer witch head a hard disk headcrash).
 

Hope my commetns are helpfull for you

Cheers
Harald

Bret Cohen wrote:

>Hi Christoph,
>
>You already know about my application & needs,
>but I did some thinking & Internet searching
>on broader topics & the results are attached
>
>Bret
>  
>