Visual node relationships

found a couple places to start: http://wiki.gudinna.com/324
and freemind on sorceforge.net. I was really think of something like TheBrain or Touchgraph.

Any ideas?

flexplorer uses PHP. Others listed in the link are in alpha or run on Java. It looks like Neotrace and others are not free. The demo (the home page) of flexplorer looks nice and maybe very cluttered, difficult to read where there are several pages.

jibbajibba's articles of GraphViz [a Drupal site] are applicable here. It looks like there was some thought about implementing GraphViz with Drupal.

Is this feature request restricted to the wiki module? Why not pursue a graphic site map module?

Anything visual would be great.

I was also thinking graphing should be general to drupal. The only reason it's not terribly useful right now is because the book module only allows one parent per node. But if a graphing package were to read through all links within the node body, plus any parent, it could prove interesting.

I think the only reason people associate graphing with wikis is because that's usually the only kind of CMS where it's found. It would definitely help drupal stand out if it had a general graphing module. I don't currently have the knowledge or time to work on such a thing, but it would be a great contribution as a standalone module.

Should we re-assign this to the drupal project? I think so.

Someone did create a graphviz sitemapping module a few versions ago. I don't remember who did it. I ran it on my site for a few weeks and thought it was pretty cool, but it was very much an experiment I think. Can't help you find the code, though, because I no longer have it. Some visualization using taxonomy and perhaps utilizing Flash might be the best way to proceed if you are to build one.

I agree this should be reassigned to Drupal > Feature Request, with current comments included. In addition to its relation to Drupal as whole, more than just Wiki, such a move may bring in more resources and suggestions.

I am also interested on this issue. I may even have a small (very small) bounty for it, since it is useful for a social project I am helping right now.

In particular, it could be very interesting to connect it to the Relationship - Node linking and Metadata module, in order to weight and label the connections.

I have more ideas and possibilities around this. Any interested/commited in this issue for form a workgroup?

Regards...

Very very intersting. Not useful for me, since my users have the philosophy of K.I.S.S. Unfortunately someone sent this issue to die in the user experience queue.

Well lets get this started again.

Currently a Freemind module exists for Drupal 4.7.x: http://drupal.org/project/freemind
Apparently it convert's the site's taxonomy to a visual mind-mapping format. Since it requires a Java VM to run, I suspect that this implementation is heavy on the resources.

Hypergraph sounds like it fits most of what the OP is requesting: http://drupal.org/project/hypergraph
Click on the demo to get a view of how it displays. This one requires the JavaVM too.

The timeline module also sounds like it kind of fits the description but not really.

Of these three modules, only Hypergraph has been written for the current stable version of drupal (5.x). I'd suggest that the OP should investigate if Hypergraph fits their needs.

Personally, I don't think visual mapping of nodes should be core feature. I'm suspicious of the programming effort and resultant footprint of the code. I'd rather just Keep it simple.

What do others think?

Yes it's definitely contrib stuff.

I think we should triage this out to hypergraph then.

Hi,

Visualization of complex networks is kind of my hobby so I am glad to meet all of you guys interested in the same.

Besides hypergraph I have also worked with Freemind, with SpringMaps, of course TouchGraph, with commercial Netmap, and with self-coded visualizations. ( There is a little gallery, by no means representative, at the UIA, which works on visualizing networks since 1971 -- see http://www.uia.be/node/47 )

This module currently only visualizes current user visible menu and so provide a way of navigating the site using the applet similar to what's done at http://hypergraph.sourceforge.net/ Very soon (within a week, really) I plan to look into visualizing taxonomies and also node relations (using the NAT module). If anybody is ready to help with this stuff, you are most welcome.

I am also thinking of adding Freemind functionality into this module -- most of the module will be the same, just network generating algorithm differs a bit. Perhaps other visualizations can be added as well, meaning 'hypergraph' will no longer be attached just to http://hypergraph.sourceforge.net/ but mean any network graph.

Ideas? Suggestions?

Cheers,

Tomáš / Vacilando

So technically this is something that is feasible. The second question is, what does this buy us? What is the benefit of creating a visual mapping? What are we mapping exactly? And is this something that should be static and rendered vs dynamic and programmatically structured.

Regardless of the answer to all of those questions is the fact that this doesn't sound like something that should be in the default installation of drupal. The default install is the bare bones install that should be targetted at meeting the common denominator set of needs for all our users.

I for one do not need this feature, ergo it shouldn't be in the base install. I am excited to see someone working on this problem though. And I'm ready to be convinced that this is can't miss feature.

Did you ever get the taxonomies or node relations (using the NAT module) that you described in #13 working?