Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Mind Dumps...er...Maps/Graphs/Trees


Since Adobe has been driving across the US, selling some AIR, I thought I'd take a closer look at Flex/Flash applications that might fit the bill for some tough ideas I have been wrestling with. In a somewhat similar GUI struggle, Rod Page has been fevershly playing with Supertrees, trying to find a web-based, non-Java solution. So, I did a bit of digging into some showcased Adobe AIR applications - tutorial and demo sites are cropping up all over the place - and a Flex application that will soon be transformed into AIR caught my eye: Mindomo. Now, if this mindmapping application had RDF tying the bits together, which came via distributed web services from GBIF, GenBank, CrossRef, etc., we'd have a real winner here. Mindomo is exactly the application I have been dreaming about for The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL)'s WorkBench; it just has to be pinned down into the biological, semantic web world. Since an AIR application can wrap all this up in a web/desktop hybrid application, I am convinced this is what EOL absolutely must produce.

2 comments:

Comapping said...

other collaborative web-based mind mapping tool worth looking at is www.comapping.com

David Shorthouse said...

Thanks, Omar. That too looks like a good one. These things are pretty cool & I'm curious how they're pinned down in a backend database.