(2003-05-30) Headmap Personal Rdf Annotation

Head Map on using apps like Touch Graph, Idea Graph, OSAF/Chandler, and TinderBox for personal Annotation Systems (Personal Knowledge Management), leveraging RDF.

*Exposing and structuring data and clearly defining relationships in a distributed environment offers a vision of a new kind of interface.

Something that looks more like Danny Ayers Idea Graph or Mark Bernstein's TinderBox.

These tools allow you to create a personal and sophisticated annotation layer to data both local and external, and also to expose your annotation layer as an XML feed. They are very visual tools. More tangibly like maps and graphs than conventional PIM-s like Outlook.

A new object is depicted as a coloured rectangle, it can refer to itself or a file elsewhere, you name it, you can open it and edit it, adding text and images. Close it again and connect it to other boxes using RDF or your own vocabulary to define the nature of the links. Your main view is boxes arranged in front of you with arrows (carrying link annotation) connecting them.

These kind of tools allow for grouping of all kinds, by color, creation date, parent child, and hierachical relationships, link attributes, keywords - all allowing you to rapidly define different views on your data, both in terms of search criteria and in terms of the visual appearance of your map view (treemaps, outlines, charts).

From the point of view of the graph based front end note also the Plumb Design Think Map application VisualThesaurus, and all the Touch Graph applications, these graphical views on data are starting to look like genuinely viable models for future desktop (and wearable) interfaces (UI). Intensely structured logically linked data lends itself to this kind of visualisation.

Just using these tools results in smaller chunks of data, more structure, more link attributes, more metadata and more URI annotation (in the same way traditional blogging tools enforced structure and added metadata).

Given connections and nesting and a range of attributes to choose your focus attribute from, these models are highly navigable, and in an open context start to realise some of the promise of Mind Mapping and mindmap sharing.*