- From: Thomas B. Passin <tpassin@comcast.net>
- Date: Mon, 01 Apr 2002 21:46:27 -0500
- To: RDF-Interest <www-rdf-interest@w3.org>
[Graham Klyne] > This may be slightly off-topic for this thread... there is a (commercial) > utility called "MindManager" which creates "mind map" diagrams -- basically > a diagrammatic tree structure, but also supporting different annotations > and cross-links. I often find it useful for making notes or capturing > ideas about a topic. > > It also supports a VB(-like) scripting facility. It has occurred to me > that it would be most useful and probably fairly easy to be able to > generate RDF from MindManager diagrams. > Unfortunately, you can't get the COM-object scripting in Mind Manager unless you buy one of the more expensive versions I really like mind maps and use them a lot, made both by hand and with Mind Manager. I did shell out for Mind Manager, and it is a wonderful product (Windows-only, though). They have a very low-cost version that can do most of what you usually want (its name has changed from time to time, I forget what it is now) - it used to be around $20 US. There are two things to remember here, though. 1) Modeling methods can range from very formal to very informal. Mind Manager is at the very informal end of the range. Its mind maps are essentially hierarchies with some bells and whistles (very useful bells and whistles). RDF needs much more formality. 2) There are virtually no semantics except for what your mind supplies by noticing connections, labels, and decorations. Your mind is really good at this, which makes the mind mapping method very effective (as well as the program) but it doesn't help much for machine consumption. So it's not really practical to automatically turn a pre-existing mind map into a useful set of triples, in my view - you only have the labels of arcs guide you as to the meaning of things. This means that you would have to set up some conventions about the use and naming of arcs in a mind map, and you would have to do extensive work in scripting data entry and display facilities to handle references to resource URIs. And it would be hard to represent graphs as opposed to trees. But maybe someone can get really clever and make use of Mind Manager for RDF or Topic Map purposes. That would be really interesting. Cheers, Tom P
Received on Monday, 1 April 2002 21:42:03 UTC