TiddlyTagMindMap Plugin (tag visualisation)

[rakugo]

Hello!
I've always struggled with conventional viewing of any large amounts
of data, and have always felt mind maps are the best way to explain
related data. I'm a big fan of "The Brain" (http://www.thebrain.com)
but wanted something that I could use alongside Tiddlywiki (as I'm
quite scattered brained).... Due to this I've been working on a plugin
for sometime now. I'm now at a point where I'm quite happy (on a
personal level) with what I've produced and am wanting to gauge
thoughts from fellow Tiddlywiki users on how I can improve this and
whether it's not just me that finds it useful.

Very much a work in progress so bound to be a few bugs in there so
apologies in advance.You can see a working example here: http://www.jonrobson.me.uk
and if you want to play with it yourself you can grab a blank version
from http://tiddlytagmindmap.tiddlyspot.com/

The basic ideas are if you tag a tiddly, it creates a relationship
between that tag and that tiddly. It is meant to be a tool to aid
yourself or a user in viewing a tiddlywiki. As you open up tiddlers
new relationships are uncovered whilst still retaining a history of
the previous tiddlers you have visited... if you are good with your
tags, this can be quite powerful for locating tiddlers you can't
remember what you've called.

For those who are interested this uses a toolkit called the JIT
(http://blog.thejit.org). Please let me know your thoughts here...
good or bad ! :)

Enjoy!
Jon

[Robert Mark Bram]

Nice work Jon - what a fascinating way to view links between
tiddlers! :)

Rob
:)

[c.skye]

Love It!!!

I tried playing around with hypergraph a little while back...and it
seemed like so much work!!! I too am a mindmap freak of many years
standing...will enjoy playing with your new development.

I notice you are using ccTiddly.....I gave up on it late last year..as
it didn´t seem to be keeping up with the latest versions of TW...and I
see you have it working with TW 2.4.0 !!! guess I can go back and try
again!!!!

Thanks

Skye

On 6 jun, 11:39, rakugo <jdlrob...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello!
> I've always struggled with conventional viewing of any large amounts
> of data, and have always felt mind maps are the best way to explain
> related data. I'm a big fan of "The Brain" (http://www.thebrain.com)
> but wanted something that I could use alongside Tiddlywiki (as I'm
> quite scattered brained).... Due to this I've been working on a plugin
> for sometime now. I'm now at a point where I'm quite happy (on a
> personal level) with what I've produced and am wanting to gauge
> thoughts from fellow Tiddlywiki users on how I can improve this and
> whether it's not just me that finds it useful.
>
> Very much a work in progress so bound to be a few bugs in there so
> apologies in advance.You can see a working example here:http://www.jonrobson.me.uk
> and if you want to play with it yourself you can grab a blank version

> fromhttp://tiddlytagmindmap.tiddlyspot.com/

[Dave Parker]

that's pretty neat! It kind of reminds me a little of Simile timeline
and that other hypergraph thing I've seen (can't remember the name).
As for improvements... would there be any way to move the graph around
with the mouse to navigate that way?

Dave Parker

[Tobias Beer]

I like your concept (as well as the (unfortunately not opensource)
theBrain) a lot.

I think, parabolic trees with draggable items are a better choice for
a mindful graph. I have seen those implemented for my last employer
based on information exported from a designated lotus notes database
and I have to say, all that was quite impressive. I think it were
better to not dynamically redraw the graph, but rather to draw it once
and only have it updated / sinced to the actual wiki content ever so
often.

How difficult do you think it would be to...
a) (optionally?) adapt your wikiMindMap to one with a parabolic tree
view?
b) get node settings for the graph from specific, yet optional mindmap-
related-tiddler-fields (e.g. twMindMapCssStyle:"style goes here",
twMindMapPreviewStyle:"popup" or "slider")
c) get "preview" from content within <part twMindMap hidden></part>
markup for the tiddler corresponding to the selected node
-> see http://tiddlywiki.abego-software.de/#PartTiddlerPlugin
...very useful!
d) make it work in ie as well
e) make the graph draw only on page reload (or via 'sync' button) and
otherwise just "animate the movement" to the next node... (to not make
it look as if it were reloading)
f) open the mindMap via a slider, to prevent it from cluttering your
screen ...just in case one finds it too excessive or even annoying
g) educate us on the basic framework of your wiki so we can understand
the way it is intended to work, rather than from looking at the
underlying code
h) abbreviate node titles in excess of more than 15 (?) characters
(+ ...), having a tooltip that shows the full title
i) lighten up the connectors... they are way too dark on your site ;-)

As you see... I think this is a rather cool plugin system, which would
be nice if it were easily installable as a package... is it?
Btw. I didn't get it to work by saving a blank wiki... it wouldn't
display a single tiddler afterwards.
I will try to import your plugin-tiddlers and see if it works, which
would truly be quite something.

[Tobias Beer]

annoying typing error: 'updated / sinced' supposedly meant 'updated /
synced'

[rakugo]

Thanks for all the comments so far.

Dave: on moving the graph aroun with the mouse, I reckon this is
possible. I just haven't worked out how yet. I don't have enough
understanding of the jit package I am using yet, but it seems this
effect is possible. So far I am able to move the node names but not
the graph but I will look into this and see what I can do :)

Tobias: lots of interesting stuff here.
a) Simpe answer.. not sure. I don't have much knowledge of the
underlying algorithms. I'll have a think about this. Is this what you
mean?: http://blog.thejit.org/wp-content/jit-1.0a/examples/hypertree.html
(if so then yes it is possible)
b) Not sure if I understand... When you say node settings do you mean
parents and children of a node or something else? I know there are
ways of encoding data within nodes. For instance in this example:
http://blog.thejit.org/wp-content/jit-1.0a/examples/rgraph.html you
can define relation types. If you mean something as a simple as a
tiddler you can modify to customise then yes - I just haven't got
round to doing this as so far the development of this has been for me
specifically without thinking of packaging it up for use by others
c) by this do you mean in another window when you highlight a node it
shows a preview of that node? If so then it if it is just a case of
calling a function on that tiddler then there will be no issue with
this, but I've never seen that plugin so would have to explore more.
d) yes.. I did have it working in IE but it was causing so many
problems I gave up. It is possible for it to work, as
http://blog.thejit.org/wp-content/jit-1.0a/examples/rgraph.html does
work in Internet Explorer. The problem I had was some of the files
this pages included are not tiddlywiki friendly and cannot be simply
pasted into a tiddler with the systemConfig tag. One day it will work,
but I suspect it won't be that soon.
e) Very easy. This is interesting as I couldn't work out the best
solution here. Drawing the complete graph is easy, but it will
increase loading time and possibly appear too cluttered? It depends
how you would want to use the map - to show all tiddler relationships
or only act as a "snail trail" of the tiddlers you have visited. I
suspect the best solution to this is to have a custom option which can
either draw the entire graph and then not update it, or only update it
on viewing.
f) Yep. I agree. I originally did a version with the hypergraph jar
app and this was simply a case of hiding the div. It's a bit more
difficult here as you have to clear all the div's created in the
drawing process. I'm sure it's possible I just haven't got my head
round this yet, but yes I would like this feature.
g) Again I agree, since I'm in developer mode I've not really thought
about how it's presented to end users but I'll look into this
h) Abbrievation of titles - hadn't thought of that but nice idea. At
the end of the day it's just a div with text in, so when drawing the
node it's pretty easy to do an onhover show full name. I'll look to do
this.
i) I think this is just a css change. Not sure what the css class is
though :)

As for installation - I haven't packaged it up into one file but again
this is quite easy and again because I'm in developer mode I've kept
all the different components separate
Hopefully this guide is useful:
http://www.jonrobson.me.uk/#%5B%5BTiddlyTagMindMap%20V%202.0%20installation%5D%5D

Thanks for all the comments. I'll be using them to try improve :)

[rakugo]

oh and just noticed that it doesn't like permalinks. Something else to
fix.

> Hopefully this guide is useful:http://www.jonrobson.me.uk/#%5B%5BTiddlyTagMindMap%20V%202.0%20instal...

[rakugo]

Okay... have added several enhancements. Node abbreviation and load
all tiddlers (But load all tiddlers seems to crash in large
tiddlywikis)
More enhancements coming soon..

[Tobias Beer]

re: a) "Is this what you mean?: http://blog.thejit.org/wp-content/jit-1.0a/examples/hypertree.html"
yep, that's what I mean, hopefully not just a clickable version but
also a "draggable"

re: b) with "node settings" I was rather referring to the rendering
engines "display settings" for each "node", such as css or markup of
those graph elements that correspond to a tiddler/tag (or its title).
I was hoping that the rendering package would allow settings on how
nodes are displayed; for example, reading data from (specifically)
named tiddler fields that one might transorm accordingly to assign it
to a (graph) node for it to display certain conten in a certain way or
even to assign an "onhover" event handler.

re: c) I mean using a (tw) popup that is assigned the content from a
(specifically named) "part" within a tiddler:
-> linkable and embeddable parts in tiddlers via:
http://tiddlywiki.abego-software.de/#PartTiddlerPlugin
-> popups maybe with: http://tw.lewcid.org/#PopupMacro or
http://www.tiddlytools.com/#NestedSlidersPlugin or the popup functions
from tw core, as I believe there is one "out of the box"

re: d) Looks like a lot depends on the rendering framework... do you
fiddle with it's code when implementing the stuff into a tw? If so,
wouldn't it be easier (and cleaner) to just reference to an (easily
updatable) js file and build upon that one? I know that would not be
tw's one-file policy... but iframes aren't either ;-) ...otherwise,
maybe it's time for a plugin to easily EMBED A JS FILE into any
tiddlywiki to have it load as a working plugin (maybe after minor
edits).

re: e) I was kind of hoping that the graph could also display nodes
incrementally... meaning: not having all relations displayed all the
time but only those that are in the "currently displayed
context" ...one might even think of a sidebar that is showing
"related" information to the currently selected node in the graph,
something that extends the mere representation of graphical links to
other nodes

re: g) I was referring to a developpers perspective, not an end-user
one ;-)

re: h) I think a tooltip with the full title would be just fine,
rather than expanding the name using onhover (like "zooming" in on the
title) ... I guess that can become quite nasty when you try to leave
it again and incidentally (or intentionally try to) get to one of the
adjacent graph nodes

re: installation) What I meant was... is it inteded to (hopefully)
work by importing those tiddlers from http://tiddlytagmindmap.tiddlyspot.com
that are tagged with "tigglitagmindmap" and have the functionality...
after inserting the code into the PageTemplate?

Are you already starting to abbreviate titles on your site? ... for
that, I have an improved idea... abbreviate the titles when longer
than xxx charachters, but show it like this:

StartofTitle...EndOfTitle (10first...10last)

...that will spare you from seeing tons of titles that start out with
the same name and hovering over each to uncover the full title, puh °.°

[Michael.Tarnowski]

Impressive work Jon!! - Are you familiar with the TW-Hypergraph-
Project, http://dahukanna.net/wiki/tiddlywiki.htm, by Dawn Ahukanna?
Cheers Michael

On Jun 6, 5:39 pm, rakugo <jdlrob...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello!
> I've always struggled with conventional viewing of any large amounts
> of data, and have always felt mind maps are the best way to explain
> related data. I'm a big fan of "The Brain" (http://www.thebrain.com)
> but wanted something that I could use alongside Tiddlywiki (as I'm
> quite scattered brained).... Due to this I've been working on a plugin
> for sometime now. I'm now at a point where I'm quite happy (on a
> personal level) with what I've produced and am wanting to gauge
> thoughts from fellow Tiddlywiki users on how I can improve this and
> whether it's not just me that finds it useful.
>
> Very much a work in progress so bound to be a few bugs in there so
> apologies in advance.You can see a working example here:http://www.jonrobson.me.uk
> and if you want to play with it yourself you can grab a blank version

> fromhttp://tiddlytagmindmap.tiddlyspot.com/

[Eric Shulman]

> maybe it's time for a plugin to easily EMBED A JS FILE into any
> tiddlywiki to have it load as a working plugin (maybe after minor
> edits).

http://www.TiddlyTools.com/#LoadRemotePlugin

* requires InlineJavascriptPlugin
* see http://www.TiddlyTools.com/#InstantBookmarklets for working
examples of usage

-e

[Tobias Beer]

Great! I will surely try LoadRemotePlugin in the next time. Maybe this
should be listed in TiddlyVault... as I wouldn't know where else to
look for a comprehensive, yet quick reference on all available plugins
for (certain versions of) tw. I do also like the idea of
bookmarklets... your own tw toolbar in your own browser, nice.

[Tobias Beer]

Dawn Ahukanna seems to have moved TW-Hypergraph to...
http://project.dahukanna.net/tiddlywiki/hypertiddlywiki/index.htm
...quite impresive

@rakugo... that's what I meant with parabolic ...well, hyperbolic
trees ;-)

Tobias.