Re: Digest for mozilla-labs-pancake@googlegroups.com - 2 Messages in 1 Topic

[Peter Houghton]

Danny

I agree with the notion discussed in the paper that you referred to that BFG are probably not much help.

The two ideas that would appear more promising would be your expanding tree and the ant pheromone trail concept that another poster put forward. That is, provide a means to follow trails rather than try and provide a visualisation  that attempts to convey the whole of one's web navigation in one go.

However, in that vein, I also wonder if it might be possible to use a landscape metaphor, i.e. overlay parts of the web onto a landscape and then show where someone has been within that landscape. The intent of this would be to provide a means to show slightly larger slices of someone's navigation.

You would have to find a means of "pruning" the tree in order to provide just enough context but no more than necessary to help people understand some of the navigation choices made i.e. why did you click on that link rather than the others on display at the same time?

Peter

On 14 April 2012 21:09, <mozilla-la...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

  Today's Topic Summary

Group: http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla-labs-pancake/topics

• the web is a directed graph [2 Updates]

 the web is a directed graph

Peter Houghton <peter4h...@gmail.com> Apr 13 02:12PM -0700  

I am very keen to hear more, especially on the visualisation of one's own
traces through the web. The reason for this is that I had this very same
idea a long time ago (probably more than a decade) and am now quite excited
to see that someone is at least talking about developing something!

What I have found very surprising is that the concept of
creating visualisations of the web's directed graphs has not been followed
up before, as its so blindingly obvious. Sadly lack of free time and aged
software development skills made it impractical for me to construct
something myself and a prior attempt to get someone interested (a web
startup company which had a similar concept) failed.

I did try and take a quick look to see if I could find the startup company
again to see what they may have developed, but no joy,...so I suspect they
have disappeared. However, I did manage to find this, which is another take
on the same idea.

http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/macwarriors/projects/trailblazer/

What is additionally interesting with this example is that they are
integrating the Lucene search engine to trawl through your history as well.
Having this combined capability outside of the Mac environment would be
excellent.

Taking the idea further, why aren't parts of the web, especially those
which attempt to encode knowledge and the relationships between concepts
(perhaps a future enhanced Wikipedia), accessible via an N-Dimensional
graph? Something along the lines of TheBrain perhaps?

http://www.thebrain.com/

Keen to converse more on this subject if this is possible. Is progress
still being made?


 

Danny Ayers <danny...@gmail.com> Apr 13 11:44PM +0200  


> Taking the idea further, why aren't parts of the web, especially those which
> attempt to encode knowledge and the relationships between concepts (perhaps
> a future enhanced Wikipedia), accessible via an N-Dimensional graph?
 
dbPedia can give you such data from Wikipedia:
http://dbpedia.org/
 
and if you like you can follow links out into the cloud:
http://richard.cyganiak.de/2007/10/lod/
 
This piece argues that the graph view is (usually) a bad idea - it's
the "Pathetic Fallacy" of the somewhat misleading title. Interesting
read though.
 
http://swui.semanticweb.org/swui06/papers/Karger/Pathetic_Fallacy.html
 
I spent a while working on a graph-oriented tool (IdeaGraph) and came
to the conclusion that the view was only really useful in conjunction
with other UI elements, and it was best to avoid having more than a
little graph on screen at a time. I think I also did hook up the bits
to allow it to navigate the HTML Web through a graph, but never got to
anything I could call genuinely useful. Incidentally, the
ever-expanding tree is quite a nice alternative, you can traverse
graphs but it's more compact.
 
Cheers,
Danny.
 
--
http://dannyayers.com
 
http://webbeep.it  - text to tones and back again


 

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