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

[Bret C. <bre...@ya...>]

Hi Harold,

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

First to clarify: The ideas I've presented are not for
my current project, which is a lot simpler. I've
already corresponded with Christoph over how to build
an Abstractor for my present purposes.

> > 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

I have no specific needs in this respect, both
approaches might be useful for different purposes. But
I had in mind the first approach. And applications
like mine have task-specific assumptions about which
topics are important, so they are not generalizable.

Christoph has already responded with an idea about
storing weights of different topics within the model
built by an Abstractor. I think he's on the right
track.

I think it would be nice to build on top of this the
possibility of using a gauge that the user could
manipulate to suggest just how much to fade out the
the topics of lesser importance relative to the more
important ones - kind of like the contrast knob on a
television. Perhaps, then, there could be a range of
color shades built into a Renderer for translating
different levels of importance, depending on where the
user sets the gauge. Or perhaps the Abstractor could
translate a user-given importance ranking into ranges
of levels for each topic.

> >- 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/

I had already been aware of jazz/picolo. That was
probably on my mind (subconsciously - or I would have
mentioned it) when I made the suggestion. I don't have
time right now to research the actual code, so I'll
leave it to you and Christoph to see if it can be
integrated with your 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
> 
> 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.

That sounds like a great idea!

Bret
--- harald kuhn <sc...@ma...> wrote:

> 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
> >  
> >
> 
> 



	
		
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