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Inxight (now apparently part of Business Objects) has a very good knowledge search, data mining, and concept analysis system in their Smart Discovery servers. I don't work for them, but helped evaluate and deploy the product in a previous job. Definitely had some useful features beyond just indexed search. http://www.inxight.com/products/

Computational morphology is doing very, very well these days. Hell, you can buy morphological analysis SDKs that cover over two dozen languages.

If you want to do something like that then the best solution I can think of would be a 3D implementation of the hyper tree like this example from inxight. THAT would actually change the way that we interact with the system, as you point out looking glass is just a fancy fake 3D window dressing on the same old concepts.

I prefer something that uses my filesystems native tree format liky Inxight's Hyperbolic tree viewer. This gives many of the advantages of a 3D viewer without totally changing the relationship between files.

p.s. for some reason the demo wouldn't run under Mozilla despite the fact that I know I have the Sun JRE installed correctly. Worked fine under IE6 =( Even worse I know it used to run under Mozilla or else I never would have found it.

Recently, there was a Slashdot article [slashdot.org] here about a "piles" feature that Apple had patented in June 2001 that sounds very familiar. Screenshot of piles [mac.com] here looks different, but the concepts appear similar:

It doesn't much look like Apple's "Piles" but more like PARC's Hyperbolic Tree, of 1994. This bit of software was spun off into a company named Inxight. Navigate their website using a Hyperbolic Tree. (good to see they eat their own dog food.) :-) (double click an end point when you want to follow a link)

If M$ finds a good use for Hyperbolic Tree navigation in Longhorn, more power to them. I have played with it off and on since 1998 and have found that without a mega-huge (as in 1600*1200+) resolution screen, you can't get much out of it.

Well then. Here we have a senior officer and founder of a dot-com that makes software to graphically analyze databases telling us how in the future information visualization will be the next hot thing. When google news does this, there is much wailing and gnashing of teeth on the net. Slashdot, Press Releases for Nerds?

Moreover, there is free and open-source implementations of those two visualizations: Treemap Java Library and Hypertree Java Library.

RDF - the XML format for metadata - essentially describes relationships between resources and is a superset of the problem area you describe. I had a cursory look to see if people had taken the obvious step of using diagram tools to edit rdf and yes they have:

Using DIA and GraMToR and GraphViz and IsaViz and lots lots more

You might also be interested in They Rule which draws some interesting social networks!

While this is all standard 2d editing (I think the 3d editing thing is nonsense btw, unless you actually have a 3d coordinate system then you are actually describing a 2d network diagram) there are other visualisation options which may be interesting. Mindmapping tools allow you to navigate the network of concepts may be interesting as are star trees. Both provide a focussed view on a small part of a much larger network with some context information to help you choose how to navigate. They are more useful for display than authoring.

Hope something in here is useful

-Baz

one thing that was mentioned in the article briefly was "star tree" from Inxight. I saw a presentation on this recently and it seemed pretty slick. it wouldn't destroy the (very useful) hierarchical structure of the current desktop, but it is a much improved method of navigating the hierarchy, in a 2d and intuitive way, but much faster. try it out here. i've wanted to use this in a file system since i saw it... i didn't know they were actually considering it.

I would then try to browse the source with a hyperbolic web visualization tool, such as Inxight or Webviz from the Geometry Center (RIP). Apparently there are many such visualization tools. Perhaps one will work well with LXR output.

I recall a few years back seeing a beta version of Microsoft Site Server somethingrather that had a site visualization tool which looked _extremely_ similar to the sitemap device used at inxight.com. I'm not sure if MS licensed it from them, or they licensed it from MS, or if it's just a nifty public-domain idea, but that is not the only place I've seen it.

Has anybody else seen this elsewhere?

Apple got the GUI right the first time out, and nobody's really made any earth shattering improvements to it since.

Maybe that's the problem. Everyone is suffering from tunnel vision and can't come up with anything really innovative.

For a hint of something that a GUI might do differently, go to http://www.inxight.com and click the "site map" link. Then imagine what it might be like if your GUI could do that right on your desktop. Maybe problematic, but it could be refined. You probably can't use Inxight's "hyperbolic tree" idea as-is because of intellectual property issues, but maybe looking at it might get the creative juices flowing to help break out of the the traditional GUI thought box.

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Peace,
vilvoy