random links pane - please

[quant]

Originally posted by zargron
What's the priority? Perhaps we ask for the fundamental architecture as V1 of this "undirectional" connection facility with fairly primitive navigation. Once users have implemented it using real life data, they contribute to ideas for the next version (V2), which has a first cut at a more powerful graphical navigation interface. Then a V3 could be released that polishes it all up once users have had experience with V1 & V2.

fine with me
The third pane for "undirectional connection" (first and second are parent and child panes), as wordmuse suggested, could be V1 ...

I suppose tree data explorer would be preferable navigation for a long time, but if user could optionally switch to "graph view" that would be nice. Already the fact that item can have more than one parent means that tree structure is not enough to display this properly and user needs to have parents pane open to have the full picture.

If the undirectional links are supported, user will need to have open two additional panes apart from data explorer tree pane to see everything, ie THREE panes to see everything, as opposed to just ONE pane for data explorer graph.

I know that displaying graph in such a way that it doesn't look messy is not an easy task, but if at any point only one level or two level connections (this could be customizable) are displayed, user might have very good "local" picture of his/her data structure. In fact, there are many sites now that use self-organizing maps, I'm sure there must be an algorithm or maybe a code as well for it, sth like this
http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html (try typing UltraRecall for example)
or as used in http://www.connectedtext.com/Image/sc2.jpg
or http://www.google.com/ig/cache/5f/8e...68e7325256.png or TheBrain ...

Any ideas, comments?