langreiter.com plain, simple: comment-2002-05-23-5

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comment-2002-05-23-5

CREATED BY alex_s • LAST EDITED BY alex_s 8248 days AGO

Hi David. I'm glad that this technology has roused you to a responce, but I am not so happy that you did not provide any links to TouchGraph or Langreiter.com (opinions expressed are my own) in your article, so I am choosing to respond here rather then on your homepage.

It would have been an especially good idea for you to provide back links since you are clearly NOT writing about TopicMaps, but rather about conceptual Maps souch as the ones featured on the above sites.

Contrary to what one might come to believe from only reading the initial quote 2002-05-22-tmTao, Topic Maps don't actually have much to do with real Maps. They are not a visual concept, and all the popular implementations do in fact use "straightforward text displays".

So on to your argument.

Your statement that "I used to use maps a lot, but have found lately that I use them less and less." just does not seem to be a good argument against maps. Even if one could make an analogy between "text based directions":"directions on a map", and "an index":"a touchgraph type map", I think that you would have to concede that still makes TouchGraph a very usefull technology. But the thing is, both real maps, and information maps are usefull for a lot more then just giving directions, so the advantages gained by using maps rather then directions is even greater then in this analogy.

Real maps give you a sence of the overall picture. Without maps you would never know the shape of any continent, since it is impossible to experience this in any other way then looking at a scaled down model. And think of the process of communicating to a tourist the sites to see in a city. You can't give directions from every point to every other point, but this information can be consicely communicated by a map.

As for defending visualizations of concepts + other entities, I think that this was well commented on by Chris: comment-2002-04-22-3 "they help broaden my short-term memory 'horizon' while looking at them, they help me discover relationships I wouldn't have thought existed and let me discover patterns where none were expected." I think that this more then justifies their existance.

--Alex (alex_s)