zim-wiki team mailing list archive

[Jaap Karssenberg <jaap.karssenberg@xxxxxxxxx>]

Marco,

The technical answer is that zim keeps all connection data in a sqlite
database (the index "cache"). All the graphviz link map does is accessing
that database and writing a graphviz file. If there are better
visualization tools, it should be rather straight forward to develop a
plugin that does that for a different data format.

It becomes more challenging when we want interactivity between the graph
and zim - then we need two-way communication. There it really helps to have
components that can be hacked to send signals back to zim.

Regards,

Jaap



On Sat, Nov 2, 2013 at 1:40 PM, Marco Cevoli <marco.cevoli@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I was drafting an article about Zim Wiki. In doing so, I remembered
> the time when I was using PersonalBrain (now TheBrain,
> www.thebrain.com) as a personal information manager. I liked its
> animated interface very much and since then I haven't found anything
> so smooth and cool for navigating networks of associations and mind
> maps.
>
> The actual Graphviz-powered map of connections is a good starting
> point, but cannot compare with TheBrain in terms of "beauty" and
> usability. Looking for some open source alternatives, I've found
> http://gephi.org/ which looks wonderful. In their own words:
> "Gephi is an interactive visualization and exploration platform for
> all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical
> graphs."
>
> They accept lots of input formats, such as:
> GEXF, GDF, GML, GraphML, Pajek NET, GraphViz DOT,  CSV, UCINET DL,
> Tulip TPL, Netdraw VNA, Spreadsheet...
>
> Since Zim Wiki is already able to export to a GraphViz, is there a way
> to get the intermediate format, so that I can try to feed it into
> Gephi?
>
> Just to be clear, the ultimate goal would be to have something similar
> to TheBrain's animated interface (that you can see on their website or
> on this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFqLUBKCFdA). If someone
> is aware of other tools getting close to this, I'm happy to know.
>
> Oh: I'd be willing to pay for this feature.
>
> Best regards
>
> Marco Cevoli
> Traduttore tecnico. Grafico. Congiungitore di punti.
> Technical translator. Graphic designer. Joiner-of-dots.
> -------------------------------------------------------
> http://www.marcocevoli.com
>