Re: [Gzz] RE: [ba-ohs-talk] Fenfire, RDF (re "Towards a Standard Graph-Based...")

[Benja Fallenstein]

Alatalo Toni wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Mar 2003, Danny Ayers wrote:
> > > A
> > > |
> > > B-A
>
> > What does this offer that
> > A-B
> > doesn't? When might it be useful in practice?
>
> if y and x axis are (sematically) different.
>
> you could reconstruct it in rdf by saying:
> A y B
> B x A
>
> A
> |
> |-x
> |
> B---A
>   |
>   y
>
> where A is the same node in differenct places on one canvas. (m.o.t.?)

Hi Danny, Toni--

I think you're talking about different things. Danny is talking about 
users placing nodes explicitly on the screen, arranging them into 
spatial structures (as in Ideagraph). Toni is talking about automatic 
views as in Fenfire Loom (or Gzz/GZigZag), where the program 
automatically arranges nodes on the screen to convey the underlying RDF 
structure (or zzstructure).

Indeed, in our Loom views, we regularly show the same node multiple 
times: say that "noteA seeAlso noteB" and "noteB isReasonFor noteA" for 
example; then, when we focus noteA, noteB is related to it in two ways, 
and we show it twice because of that. (Sorry, I don't have a screenshot 
program ready :-/ )

After reflection, I do think that placing the same node at two different 
locations can make sense, though. In Spatial Hypertext, the arrangement 
of nodes is used to convey structure as we would on e.g. a conventional 
blackboard or scratchpad etc.

Let's say a user is making groups of people by placing person nodes 
together in different locations of the screen (spatial canvas). What if 
a person is in more than one group?

(Maybe these kinds of spatial structuring isn't what you're after in 
Ideagraph; but on the other hand, why allow the user to hand-structure 
the arrangement of the graph if not to have them make use of that 
spatial arrangement? In any case, it would be nice if the same 
vocabulary could be used by other tools that let users arrange things 
spatially...)

- Benja