WikiMaps

Jeremy Ruston has made a new wiki - it's really interesting. He presented it at dorkbot . It's called TiddlyWiki .

WikiMap, SuperLiquidWiki .... (add more here)

Develop tools for laying out wiki pages spatially to show relationships between them, zooming around a shared large, non-linear 2D space.

This is not just a wiki visualisation tool, an authoring tool too, like writing wiki using something like inspiration , so you can create nodes, fill with text, assign graphical qualities, arrange on a 2d plane, and link nodes collaboratively.

Maps rather than ratings. Sharing each other's views, our ways of arranging information visually as well as textually is a better way of filtering information than 'ratings' systems like slash. Helps avoid majority censorship. A bit like how amazon's recommendations system works (friend of a friend mapping)

"naive attempts to draw unfiltered graphs of the nodes and edges of a hypertext quickly degenerate into meaningless hairy blobs" - [1]

Users of wiki map are sharing editorially-mediated maps of the wiki space. Anyone should be able to create a new view of the wiki universe, and can arrange pages in the view + link pages together with lines / colour / embedding.

Should be able to scale nodes on the map to represent importance + pan and zoom across wiki space.

All pages should be directly editable, so we go for wysiwyg editing. Version differences could be represented by variably transparent layers. History of a page could be regressed by a slider.. like editing AV media.

this an essential tool in preparation for the RDFing / Wikiization of the world.

users should be able to subscribe to someone else's view of the wiki, or mix their view of the wiki with other people's, so you get editorial teams / group views developing.

history of browsing should also be incorporated into the interface - so people's paths through documents generate 'worn tracks', these add semantic info to the documents. This could be a side project. - As Jeremy says:

"What I'd like is for my browsing history to form itself into one of those classic autolayout treeviews, with the various branches and links shown (so you can see where you came from, as well as the order that pages were loaded, all working sensibly when you have multiple browser windows open). This graph then gets whacked into my personal area of the wikispace, so I can modify it, rearrange it and share it."

http://touchgraph.sourceforge.net/ - an OS vector mapping toolset, includes a wiki browser project (looks good) and other web visulalisation things. This could be a useful starting point for mapping software development, but is only a visualisation tool, and doesn't alloow 2d fixed arrangement.
http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?VisualizeTheWiki - Visualise the wiki - kind of limited, but very neat wiki-visualisation thing. Works with imagemaps and co-ordinates.
http://www.inspiration.com - getting there, but hopeless semantically and obviously doomed.
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/pad++/ - one of a host of "zoomable user interfaces" (ZUIs) - very useful for this project
http://xanadu.com/zigzag/ - Ted Nelson's utterly insane Zigzag thing: flawed because it's cell-based, rather

than continuous.

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