[Sigia-l] WINDS relation browser

[Dawn Ressel Nidy]

Thanks for sharing this resource.  I would love to
have seen a hybrid of the CIA World Factbook and the
interactive capabilities of the WINDS relation
browser.  I don't think the latter is exploiting the
best potential of either.  

For instance, I agree with Eric that you should retain
the map as the main cue for relationships.  I
absolutely love geographic maps because of their
ability to distill so much complex information into an
easily understandable form.  Why would you take that
away from this tool? Arbitrarily-placed, equally-sized
bubbles do not give any valuable information about the
nature of the relationship, only that there is one.  

Also, so much of the useful data has been stripped
out, where the CIA's database has so much wonderful
data.  The WINDS browser also is not implemented in a
complete way.  For instance, if you navigate to the
"Italian" language, "Italy" is missing.  If you
navigate to "English," the UK and US are missing.  How
sloppy.

What *would* be very useful is to be able to click on
"Italy" and then click on an attribute of that country
and see the map zoom out (with the capability to
control the zoom level or directionally pan) to show
any other country that shares that attribute.  For
example, I'd love to see all the countries that speak
Italian highlighted on the map and have the
mouse-overs activated for those countries.  From the
"Italian" attribute then I could click on Switzerland
and find that it has a temperate climate and then show
all countries with a similar climate, and so on.  An
implementation like that would be a powerful
visualization tool and would be useful as a learning
tool.

Dawn Nidy


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