Hi David There has been quite a lot of experimentation within the TiddlyWiki on both structured data and visualisations. Also, some of our recent work in Osmosoft on TiddlySpace is exploring how structured data sets can be published and reused.
In terms of structured data, TiddlyWiki is still based on tiddlers being simple name/value pairs with a title string and a body string. On top of that it allows for structured data in two ways: * tiddler fields are custom name/value string pairs that can be attached to tiddlers. Some of these fields are used internally (eg as metadata for the synchronisation scheme), but can be extended by plugin writers. Custom fields would be used for geotagging a tiddler * tiddler slices and sections are ways of addressing substrings within the body of a tiddler. Slices allow data to be extracted either from name/value pairs in tables or lists, while sections can be used to extract chunks of content based by the name of their containing heading or subheading There is a frequent and interesting debate within the community as to how to choose between the two approaches in different circumstances. There is a tension between ones desire to simplify relationships by encapsulating related information into a single container, and the realisation of one of TiddlyWikis guiding principles: that information is more reusable, and therefore more useful, if you chop it up into the smallest semantic units. Both approaches are well supported by plugins - Eric Shulman's TiddlyTools has a extensive support for forms, tabular editting, and "tag-grids" In terms of visualisations, there's been quite a few plugins to integrate various hyperbolic tree views and so on. Dawn Ahukanna's adaptation of your SIMILE Timeline plugin into TiddlyWiki attracted a lot of interest in the community back in 2007. Osmosoft is currently involved in a couple of projects that bear upon these topics: * Open Britain, a project to build an open data store of information for disabled visitors to Britain, where we are integrating geocoding within TiddlySpace * Preso, a project to allow people to construct 2D spatial maps of content that exploit instinctive conventions for communicating relationships and relevance * TiddlySpace, which includes the addition of native SVG support to TiddlyWiki, partly prompted by an interest in using SVG for data visualisations * Jon Robson has given us http://charts.tiddlyspace.com/, which shows an approach for rendering dynamic charts from tabular data, and http://mindmaps.tiddlyspace.com/ I believe that TiddlyWiki and TiddlySpace have a useful niche for these types of applications. The ability to construct standalone data capture forms with TiddlyWiki is cool, and the ease with which one can archive a fully functional, interactive self-contained visualisation that doesn't require a server is potentially disruptive. Best wishes Jeremy -- http://jermolene.com http://tiddlywiki.com http://osmosoft.com On 17 Dec 2010, at 09:05, David <[email protected]> wrote: Thanks for the kind words. I remain pretty enthusiastic about the SIMILE vision. I developed Dido to prove out the idea, and doing so independent of tw was the easiest. But having done it, I think it would be interesting to discuss whether some of the same ideas --- holding structured data and offering visualizations --- might be worth considering for future use in tw. We'd of course be happy to contribute and help with the use of the simile widgets visualizations. Note that we have also integrated these visualizations into a standard wiki framework --- mediawiki: http://projects.csail.mit.edu/wibit -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWikiDev" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywikidev?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWikiDev" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tiddlywikidev?hl=en.
