I am hoping more experienced programmers and GUESS users may be able
to provide some guidance on a project I am planning. I am using
Zotero, a Firefox plugin, to keep track of bibliographic information
and organize PDF's of articles and book chapters. I would also like to
use it to write short notes about the documents. However, Zotero does
not have the functionality of named relations between notes. You
cannot create a "supporting" or "challenging" link between two notes.
I would like to add this functionality along with visualization
through GUESS. The real problem is that I am not a very skilled
programmer. But, I may be able to cobble this together using a series
of Python scripts. Here is my basic plan:

Zotero maintains a permanent sqlite file of all its data. I would
write a Python script that reads this file and exports a subset of the
information into a GDF or GraphML file or as a series of addNode and
addEdge statements. I would load this into GUESS and then manually add
the named edges between note nodes that I want using either addEdge
statements in the interpreter or mouse methods I do not quite grasp
yet.

I will continue to add new documents to Zotero and generate new notes.
But, I will likely not delete anything very often. So, any relations
between notes will enjoy semi-permanent node names. I was hoping to be
able to just regenerate all the Zotero-related data every time I
wanted to work in GUESS, overwriting all the old data except the
manually generated relations between note nodes. So, the latter would
need to be saved after every session and merged with the newly
generated Zotero information.

I am fishing for comments and advice--especially concerning
difficulties I may not have considered.

thank you in advance,
-david

David Epstein, ABD
Urban & Regional Planning Program
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor