Touch Graph Wiki Graph Browser

WikiGraph Browser build in Touch Graph, which was a Java app, not applet

See 2002-03-25-e for description of WikiGraph Browser using Touch Graph.

• Marc Conley provided some Zope code to generate the node/link data for Touch Graph for me. It misses some connections (e.g. when I glom 2 Wiki Names together with a "/" it sees it as a single long word not matching my list of Wiki Names), but not much. 1135 nodes (1623 edges) (as of May17'02)!

  • hmm, it's worse than that - any Wiki Name with punctuation adjacent gets skipped. So I think there are lots and lots of edges missing. Marc's given me a new cut of code, but I have to muck with it a bit to get it working... (because his original code uses an External Method, while mine uses a simpler Python Script - scripts can't use the regexp library)

  • I might just try a hack using string.translate to convert the most common punctuation to spaces before splitting into words... Yup, did that hack and bumped up to 3061 edges (1143 nodes, I've been adding).

• Download the app, then get my webseitzwiki-tg.txt and webseitzwiki-tg.bat. Here's a screenshot. Alex is working on a tweak of the code to make this something that can be used more easily remotely, rather than having to download 2 files.

• Ultimately I would love to be able to get to the far step of creating/editing Wiki nodes in Touch Graph. Apparently that's in the vision - see Meatball Wiki:Touch GraphWikiBrowser! (Then have to use Wiki And Outlining, maybe using Buzz Outliner, to edit the contents of a given page!)

• I've suggested to Alex passing along the first sentence of each wiki page, to be visible via popup. That would be especially helpful for me, where my WebLog nodes have date-stamps for names, which are obviously less descriptive than the average Wiki Name.

• Alex is exploring pulling data via XmlRpc (maybe in smaller chunks?)

• if every wiki had this data available (in some standard way, like from a standard Wiki Name), and everyone was implementing InterWikiMap (see WikiWeb) consistently, then this could become a super-cool cross-wiki browser!

  • with the proper data available, this could also be great for mapping Blog Thread bits

• similar to what Jon Udell has written about (a) truncating RSS and (b) tweaking the input type for the Google browser, you could filter the input data to perhaps make the view a little cleaner.

  • the WikiWikiWeb:VisualTour ignores "small" pages (and has some other rules) to keep things small. I'm not sure that would work as well in this situation - but maybe making smaller pages gray (until clicked on?) would help

(user comment) Bill, would you be willing to include your (current) link-generation code on this page for easy reference? The possibilities of viewing wiki data is too cool

Update: I [generated](http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/5893854/Web Seitz-2003) a Word Le Tag-Cloud from this (2003) file.