going beyond limits of parent/child links

[igoldsmid]

Or, the "Semantic Web" for UltraRecall,
Or, going way beyond "Tree Clutter":

I am using UR as my primary information management application. I have experimented a lot with other ones, especially those that enable great flexibility in many to many linking between objects/Items - where the links can be custom defined according to users desired meanings. AND then all the linkages between all the objects/Items can be represented graphically in a network diagram.

as in: http://www.connectedtext.com/screenshots2.html

For example:

Item1 (person) is an employee of Item 2 (company)
Item 2 (company) is a subsidiary Item 3 (company)

Person 1 is work colleague of Person 2
Person 2 is connected via xyz property to Person 3

etc etc.

Thus there can as many custom defined links as one wishes.. and then any two Items can be linked with any number of different link types/values... ultimately a complex network of linkages will arise between all Items in the database.

Now of course at an extremely basic level this can easily be achieved using attributes for each link type - and the values of the attributes would be one or more other Items. But that wouldn't work come to think of it because UR doesn't presently store values of user defined attributes as clickable links. And even if it did, finding the "backlinks" from Items that are declared as values in other Items' relationship Attributes makes the whole idea rather messy and probably unworkable?

However, the real power will be where you can easily see relationships between Items that are more distant than those just one step away - and not just parent or child.

In a sense this is one of the key benefits being talked about in the "Semantic Web". In other words, the ability to generate new knowledge, or uncover hidden knowledge by seeing relationships between things that were not previously visible.

So what I am thinking here and asking co-users of UR, and Kinook to consider:

1.Creating a new mechanism for linking Items to Items via an unlimited number of custom definable link types
2. Not representing these links of course in the tree - but adding a network visualization component to UR to see all of "it" - for example see:

http://www.connectedtext.com/screenshots2.html

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/

Make sense?

Anyone else think this is cool? Important? Highly Desirable? Etc..

IJG

[wordmuse]

In my experience you need to be very careful if you're going to make that kind of interface useful. It is so incredibly easy to get clutter instead of information. Visual Thesaurus almost gets it right by enabling you to show "distant" relationships more faintly. But it still gets very cluttered.

I think the main problem for me is that the size of the screen doesn't easily support this - or maybe it's just the poor artistry of the developers?

In any event, I agree about the usefulness, but I would hate to see UR diverted from its main mission, which it does so well.

There used to be a DOS product called "Houdini" by MaxThink which was truly elegant at this. But even with it, it was so easy to get lost in the minutia.

I don't mean to put a damper on a good idea like this. I voted "interesting." But it needs to be done really well or not at all in my view. And I suspect that doing it really well is not a slam dunk.

Regards,
Bal

[quant]

I think this is one of the most crucial thing features UR should concentrate on. I cite myself from another post

"Now that you can add internal links, one should be able to see all the links pointing to a given item. That creates further challenge cause there are already child items, so it needs to be somehow distinguished. Also, I would like to really create a linked item, not a copy of an item. I know this has been discussed, but as it is now, it's impossible to see where the real item is, and what is only supposed to be a link. So there could be three different things:
- internal links
- linked items (item having only one parent but linked to many items, unless the item is of the last form)
- item having more than one parent (the current representation of linked item with shortcut icons)

Having now various connection levels in the tree, it is crucial to navigate it more efficiently because the tree structure then becomes very poor representation of the different relations between the items. I wont name the softs that already have this feature of data structure visualization."