[Wsuug] everything's a graph

[Jon Zuck]

Yes, it was interesting. Any real collection of items, people, ideas,
anything... is going to be more graph-like in having many different kinds of
relationships than simply belonging in a single category.  Mind maps seem to
be an attempt to sketch out ideas in a graphy way, and the visual
thesaurus<http://www.visualthesaurus.com/>and some other user
interfaces I've seen do too, but they're very rare, and
their novelty seems to me to undercut their usability a bit. A conventional
thesaurus is for me quicker and more informative than VT... the neat-o
factor is a distraction more than anything else.

An exception of course are actual maps... Places are represented with their
infinite relationships to all the other places on the map treated at once.

I'm thinking that the key will be for graphy interfaces to be as intuitive
as a list is... It will probably work better for concrete things familiarly
experienced together, rather than abstract things subjectively grouped
together.

jon


On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 11:28 PM, Zach Young <young.zach at gmail.com> wrote:

> Kelley Walker <kcwalker at inkworkswell.com> wrote:
> > So, now I'm curious about how to think of everything as a graph. :)
>
> Well first off, I guess I should define what I'm talking about. From
> Wikipedia:
>
> "A "graph" in this context refers to a collection of vertices or
> 'nodes' and a collection of edges that connect pairs of vertices." [1]
>
> I was working on some code to set up a graph and then I was thinking
> about how pretty much everything could be represented as a graph
> (individual items are nodes/vertices and the connections between them
> are edges.
>
> ***Lists are just a subset of graphs (with a parent vertex capable of
> having multiple children, but without the ability of a child to have
> multiple parents.)***
>
> The problem with graphs is that they can be difficult to organize in a
> meaningful way, especially on a flat surface. Lists are much quicker
> and easier to read.
>
> A couple of examples of graphs (on the Internet)
>
> 1. The Internet itself (each page is a vertex and outbound and inbound
> links are edges.)
>
> 2. Friends on a social networking site (A list would represent an
> individuals friend, but a graph would display the interactions between
> different friends.)
>
> Anyway, I thought that was interesting. Maybe someone else will as well.
>
> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graph_theory
>
> Zach Young | 757.462.0045 | http://zachyoung.org
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-- 
Jon

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