Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

December 2, 2010

Silverlight Pivotviewer – A Turning Point For Visualizing Topic Maps?

Filed under: Interface Research/Design,Pivotviewer,Software — Patrick Durusau @ 9:32 am

Andrew Townley has suggested Gary Flake: is Pivot a turning point for web exploration? as an example of “wow” factor.

From a search on Pivot I found: Silverlight Pivotviewer is no longer experimental.

On the issue of “wow” factor, I have to agree. This is truly awesome.

I am sure there are corner cases and bugs, but I think kudos are due to the developers of Silverlight Pivotviewer.

Now the question is what do “we,” as in the topic maps community, do with this nice shiny tool?

Questions:

  1. What are the factors you would consider for navigation of your topic map? (3-5 pages, no citations)
  2. How would you test your navigation choices? (3-5 pages, no citations)
  3. Demonstration of navigation of your topic map. (class demonstration)

4 Comments

  1. Hi,

    anyone who wants to see PivotViewer and Topic Maps in action? Have a look here:
    http://topicmapsforge.org/pivotviewer

    There you’ll find all PivotViewer collections which are provided by our system. These collections are calculated on the fly using data provided by the hosted topic maps.

    With kind regards,

    Stefan

    Comment by Stefan Kesberg — December 2, 2010 @ 11:31 am

  2. Thanks!

    I do have a question. Are you working on merging collections that have different key/value pairs that identify the same subjects?

    Comment by Patrick Durusau — December 2, 2010 @ 11:53 am

  3. Hi,

    the user is browsing one collection e.g. provided by the CIA Factbook topic map. Now she decides to learn more about “Germany” and soccer related data. She selects the “Teams” collection from the 2010 Soccer World Cup topic map, maybe using a dropdown list, and now both collections are merged resulting in one newly created collection which provides an integrated view on “Germany”.

    Is this your idea? If yes I’ll create an ticket in our issue system 🙂

    Comment by Stefan Kesberg — December 4, 2010 @ 5:25 pm

  4. @Stefan, yes, that would be one scenario, where the user chooses a subject that is the binding point for the new collection, the result of merging two previously distinct collections.

    A slightly different case presented when the Europeans say “football” and a US site (incorrectly) 😉 says “soccer,” when describing the same event. I suppose you could dodge that issue by saying event, date, city, teams names (likely to be the same in Europe and US) but I suspect there are going to be cases that aren’t quite so easy to avoid.

    How would I declare a set of properties as being semantically equivalent to another set of properties? (assume the property sets to be distinct but then we can work our way back to where some of the properties are the same but have different values for the same subjects)

    Thanks!

    Comment by Patrick Durusau — December 4, 2010 @ 7:14 pm

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