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Widget that displays inter-related information in a more engaging way than a basic tag cloud

Asked by [ Editor ] , Edited by Simon Probert [ Editor ]

Ok so tag clouds are cool, the work etc etc – but are they fun and engaging? Has anybody come up with a better way?

Personally I love the idea of Touchgraph, or one f it’s cousins Thinkmap – of course these are commercial products ( although TG used to be open source years ago ) And of course they are Java which doesn’t help much

Does anybody have any other interfacing suggestions for showing networks of inter-related information?

There’s a good list of a few java ones here

Maybe there is an equivalent in Ruby or (shudders) flash?

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3 answers

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spacecowboy [ Editor ]

Ok so this one is pretty cool: http://word-cumulus-goog-vis.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/demo.html

It’s a tag cloud that rotates around a central axis, built on the google vizualisation api – but it’s not the same as touchgraph pinging open elastic nodes type approach – nevertheless a cool tag cloud

I should imagine there’s a few flash implementations of this that suck in XML or something

This one is commercial but more the kind of thing http://asterisq.com/products/constellation/roamer/demo ( commercial )

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spacecowboy [ Editor ]

Ok so a rotating flash based tag cloud is pretty easy and there are numerous ones available, I will implement a simple one anyway for now. As it gives a nice bit of movement to the tag cloud

However a “Topic Map” is more interesting in many ways

So this looks interesting; http://thejit.org/static/v20/Jit/Examples/RGraph/example1.html

Hmm… ok theres a few flash ones “topic maps” seems to be the keyword

A ruby framework: http://docs.topicmapslab.de/rtm/

Flare: Uses Flash actionscript but looks totally rad http://flare.prefuse.org/

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socialmediator [ Editor ]

spacecowboy, dude..

thank you for the interesting thoughts about tags, topic visualization and UI

this is just about one of my favorite all time design issues.. and I have visited your links (repeatedly) and spent much time in cogitation

I have an ongoing project to install test and evaluate desktop tagging systems because I hate trying to access my files via simple tree when they need to live in a many-to-many network tag space ..but Windows is wretched at tagging due to poor O/S level meta data tools (Mac is much better)

some of the windoze desktop tagging tools I have used include: tag2find, taggedfrog, taggtool.. interesting stuff especially in cases of clustered and nested tag structures ( which I need for my file systems) .. but generally not ready for primetime IMO.. I wound up using a personal file management system called the Brain ( note: this is not my Brain.. don’t know the guy.. just an example)

Link: Personal Brain Applet

Brain is truly a many-to-many topic network that mimics neuronal structures in the brain.. much recommended.. and they have an enterprise version with API that I hope to use in a funded project someday.

in general.. I think we agree that topic/tag management needs to be taken to another level for KEs and Shapado is a great test bed for this

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spacecowboy
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The brain concept is certainly an interesting one – I will have a closer look when i have a few spare moments – interesting to know how they implemented that as it is very slick

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