Tag: mindmap

Mindmap standard?

Eric Blue has A Call To Action: The Need For A Common Mind Map File Format. He provides some very good reasons for such a format, in particular the ability to share mindmaps on the web. Before going any further, I should say I take sharing things on the web as meaning with deep, granular access to the data/content, not just placing an opaque blob file on a server. Before getting to the format, there’s an underlying problem that may be harder. There isn’t as yet a sharable model of what a mindmap is.

maybe one day. mindmaps have been a long time coming but are still nowhere

Online mind mapping

So that led me to think a little deeper on why in the first place I did not firstly find more options and secondly something more ready for large scale use. Let me try to explain why

  1. Mind mapping is a very nascent concept without any widespread acceptance as a better tool for several activities that we do. There also seems to be no agreement on the fact that it would be tool for productivity improvements.
  2. Point #1 could either be seen as a opportunity or as a hurdle. Looking at the scenario it appears that people look at it as more of a hurdle than any opportunity
  3. Lack of standardization in creating and saving maps. If a company comes up with this offering but I cant move a map created there into another website or product the acceptance of this will be limited

i wanted this in 2002. still nothing. if mindmanager had a better web story, i might upgrade, even.

a Map of Every Thought

How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought you Think
That’s the title of a book I wrote. Guess what it’s about! It’s about how to make a complete map of every thought you think! But it has some other things in there; It talks about visual language, maps, computerized notebooks, theory of notebooks, yadda yadda yadda.

I am a huge mind mapping fan, and friends who are into notebooks. You may also like this interview with Lion. Thanks to the always interesting Seb.

From XSD to RDFS

i got the mindmanager x5 schemas:

meanwhile, the RDF schema for FOAF. now, to find ways to map between XSD and RDFS here are normalization rules as a start.

XSD Component RDFS Resource Properties
Element declaration R->type definition N->element name
complex type definition rdfs:Class (root) rdfs:SubClassOf ->type definition
complex type definition N->complex type name or ->type definition + “_class”
attribute declaration rdfs:Class R->type definition N->attribute name
Attribute group definition model group definition rdfs:Property Class: N->group name + “_class” Property: N->group name R->group (class)
wildcard rdfs:Class + rdfs:Property (definition) N->attribute wildcard + “_value” R->rdfs:Literal
simple type definition rdfs:Property (any)
rdfs:Literal
rdfs:Class (list)

why is this useful? how would you like to edit RDF data (FOAF’?) in mindmanager?

Semantic web mindmanager?

Here are some questions I got from Michael Scherotter, development manager for mindmanager x5 Pro about the future direction of the product. They are looking at innovative uses of mindmanager, and how to leverage XML. I suggested that Mindmanager might be a tool to help build the semantic web. But read Michael’s questions, and opine away.

  • What kind of tool and services built on MindManager X5 Pro would you like to see developed for the semantic web?
  • Do you see MindManager X5 Pro as a tool for building the semantic web, visualizing it, or both?
  • What software, systems, and companies use OPML?

Some comments by the trackback-challenged ben. Are you hinting at a buyout? 🙂

Mindmap to outline

continuing with my mindmanager x5 experiments, i wrote XSLT that converts the native mindmanager xml format to OPML. as it turns out,
if you disregard the presentational information that mindmanager stores for each node, the 2 formats are quite alike. it was very easy to convert from one to the other.
i have yet to do the inverse, opml2mindmanager. i guess i could figure out the minimal requirements for the mindmanager xml representation, but i will probably wait until mindjet releases their mindmanager x5 developer docs. you’d want to round trip to make this useful beyond satisfying your inner geek.
i always liked outlines, being very much a list person, but when i discovered mind mapping software, something clicked. i realized that i could harness latent visualization skills to help with retention of ideas. my clumsiness with analog media had prevented me from experimenting with mind maps earlier. not so with mindmanager.
the biggest improvement of mind maps over outlines is the ability to relate nodes in a mind map to each other. also of interest, embellishing a mind map with visual clues. i know that some outliner let you attach links to a node, but unless i am missing something, there can only be one link per node.
i am not yet sure what i will use this XSLT for. here are some ideas:

  • export mind maps as outlines (obvious)
  • annotate imported OPML blogrolls
  • prototype sitemaps (though i am not sure if any CMS besides the userland products uses OPML for that)
  • aggregate with other XML data (RSS, FOAF etc)

mindmanager ships with some XML aggregation samples, such as the ability to associate RSS feeds with certain nodes in the mind map. upon first glance, it struck me as a toy, but i am sure they are only scratching the surface there. mac users have had software to correlate feeds, contacts, bookmarks, pictures etc for a while, but i am not sure if these products hit a sweet spot just yet. then again, they exude cool, and that is reason enough 🙂
i am pretty confident that interesting stuff like XTM support will fall into place quickly once mindjet builds upon it’s quite active community and encourages it to innovate. being of the geek tribe, i am not very often prepared to pay for software (with all the open source solutions out there), but i gladly pay for mindmanager.
anyway, let me know if you think this is hot area, or have ideas for exploration.