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RE: Another such tool: Re: [ba-ohs-talk] Mind mapping tool


At 11:14 AM 10/29/2002 +0100, Danny Ayers wrote:
> >> It seems that all they do
> >> it take cluster suggestions such as those returned by www.vivismo.com and
> >> form a hierarchical map out of them.  The problem with hierarchical views
> >> is that they don't give you a sense of how an item could fall
> >into multiple
> >> categories.  This same data could have been rendered using Inxight's star
> >> tree.
>
>Or for that matter with TouchGraph  (as Alex modestly neglects to mention)
>:
>http://www.touchgraph.com/    (01)

Thanks Danny, no modesty here though.  I am pretty confident that 
TouchGraph should only be used when dealing with non-hierarchical or 
multi-hierarchical data.  Plain hierarchies would best be displayed with 
other tools such as inxight or http://www.elastictech.com/html/demos.html    (02)

However, on further experimentation with www.vivismo.com , I realized that 
the tree view on the left (which is expandable) actually has some repeating 
websites at the leaves, which would in fact make it a good candidate for 
display with TG.    (03)

>I agree with Alex's point about the limitations of hierachical views, and
>it's a common drawback to virtually all the 'mindmapper' type tools,
>whatever their subject matter. For such tools to become *really* useful, in
>my opinion they will need to have at least two fundamental characteristics :
>a (node & arc) graph based model; a globally interoperable data format.
>There appear to be two major alternatives available for the model/format -
>XML Topic Maps (XTM) and Resource Description Framework (RDF). (I'm
>currently working on a tool of this type primarily using the latter).    (04)

Speaking of Topic Maps, here is advanced notice about two TouchGraph based 
tools that recently came out:    (05)

http://www.tm4j.org/tmnav.html TMNav a topic map visualizer (Download a 
usable demo from sourceforge )
http://kaon.semanticweb.org/Members/motik/oimodeller KAON Ontology Editor, 
run java webstart demo from http://kaon.semanticweb.org/demos    (06)


>I'm sure that this has already been noted, but just for the record there's
>also the CMapTools tool :
>http://cmap.coginst.uwf.edu/
>which is already in very widespread use in schools etc, and from what I
>gather has until recently been using a proprietary format for data
>interchange, but will in the near future use XTM.    (07)

Good link, and good to hear about the CMap's switch to XTM.    (08)

--Alex    (09)