[Sigia-l] Quintura

[Karl Fast]

> Which brings me to my question: have you ever seen *any* successful
> application [visual node-mapping apps] of this notion in any domain?


The visual thesaurus is on version 3 and is fairly popular.

Mind mapping tools like The Brain, Mindjet, MindMapper, and Freemind
have a small but dedicated following. 

IAs create site maps, which are manually created link-node diagrams.

There are many examples of human-generated link-node diagrams, so the
idea of algorithmically generated ones is not unreasonable. 

I have serious doubts about their value for classic information
retrieval tasks (quintura.com seems to believe otherwise), but I do
believe they can be used to support other kinds of tasks. 

In my view, many of these tools suffer from weak interaction and
inappropriate interaction techniques. The designers/developers tend to
focus on computational aspects of generating the representation, which
is a hard problem. However, I think better interaction could make a
big difference.

This is certainly true in other areas. Annotation, for example. We
know that annotating is an important aspect of working with paper
documents, and a crucial interaction for knowledge work. But
annotation works best as a mostly unself-conscious and highly fluid
interaction process. Most digital annotation tools are too cumbersome.
That does not mean that we should abandon the notion of digital
annotation. 

>From a research perspective there is much we do not yet know.



-- 
Karl Fast
http://www.livingskies.com/