Congratulations, Dido is a considerable piece of work, and fabulous to
see you both reusing so many useful components, and yet coming up with
something that's really quite novel. Like many in the community, I've
long been a fan of your Simile widgets.
Best wishes
Jeremy
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Jeremy Ruston
mailto:jer...@osmosoft.com
http://www.tiddlywiki.com
There has been quite a lot of experimentation within the TiddlyWiki on
both structured data and visualisations. Also, some of our recent work
in Osmosoft on TiddlySpace is exploring how structured data sets can
be published and reused.
In terms of structured data, TiddlyWiki is still based on tiddlers
being simple name/value pairs with a title string and a body string.
On top of that it allows for structured data in two ways:
* tiddler fields are custom name/value string pairs that can be
attached to tiddlers. Some of these fields are used internally (eg as
metadata for the synchronisation scheme), but can be extended by
plugin writers. Custom fields would be used for geotagging a tiddler
* tiddler slices and sections are ways of addressing substrings within
the body of a tiddler. Slices allow data to be extracted either from
name/value pairs in tables or lists, while sections can be used to
extract chunks of content based by the name of their containing
heading or subheading
There is a frequent and interesting debate within the community as to
how to choose between the two approaches in different circumstances.
There is a tension between ones desire to simplify relationships by
encapsulating related information into a single container, and the
realisation of one of TiddlyWikis guiding principles: that information
is more reusable, and therefore more useful, if you chop it up into
the smallest semantic units. Both approaches are well supported by
plugins - Eric Shulman's TiddlyTools has a extensive support for
forms, tabular editting, and "tag-grids"
In terms of visualisations, there's been quite a few plugins to
integrate various hyperbolic tree views and so on. Dawn Ahukanna's
adaptation of your SIMILE Timeline plugin into TiddlyWiki attracted a
lot of interest in the community back in 2007.
Osmosoft is currently involved in a couple of projects that bear upon
these topics:
* Open Britain, a project to build an open data store of information
for disabled visitors to Britain, where we are integrating geocoding
within TiddlySpace
* Preso, a project to allow people to construct 2D spatial maps of
content that exploit instinctive conventions for communicating
relationships and relevance
* TiddlySpace, which includes the addition of native SVG support to
TiddlyWiki, partly prompted by an interest in using SVG for data
visualisations
* Jon Robson has given us http://charts.tiddlyspace.com/, which shows
an approach for rendering dynamic charts from tabular data, and
http://mindmaps.tiddlyspace.com/
I believe that TiddlyWiki and TiddlySpace have a useful niche for
these types of applications. The ability to construct standalone data
capture forms with TiddlyWiki is cool, and the ease with which one can
archive a fully functional, interactive self-contained visualisation
that doesn't require a server is potentially disruptive.
Best wishes
Jeremy
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