Argumentation Structure
Concept Scheme
Issues
- It turns out people really, REALLY hate the Circos plot.
- It turns out, after some use, that "Questioned by" is a stronger form of "Suggests".
- It turns out, after some use, that Arguments are really a special kind of Issue.
- If you select a relation type in "Create new" and switch to "Connect existing" or vice versa, the relations are forgotten.
- Two nearly-identical HTML forms on the page is unacceptable UI.
- Sometimes we want to enter new subjects, and sometimes we want to connect existing ones.
- Sometimes we need to be able to disconnect the connections between two subjects that were made by accident.
- It turns out Circos plots have their own problems, but they're good enough for now!
- Circos plots, being circular, create a considerable amount of wasted whitespace around them.
- SVG+RDFa sounds like a plan. What should the graphic look like?
- Great idea. How?
- We need to be able to be able to get a sense of the topological situation of a subject (page in context) beyond its immediate neighbourhood.
- The number of CSS rules explodes in size when you multiply the number of classes and properties by the number of variants and states (background, hover, etc.).
- In the standard hexagonal HSV colour model, green is twice as bright as red, and six times as bright as blue.
- We need the UI to be able to differentiate between classes of subject, as well as the different semantic relations.
- So we can get the data into the app, and we know what data we want to represent, but now we need an interface to navigate through it.
- Designing and implementing the protocol was painless enough, but what RDF vocabulary should we use to test it?
- How are we going to actually get the RDF data into storage on the server side?
- Entering ad-hoc RDF data is tedious enough when it's HTTP(S) URLs, but UUIDs make it an EXTREMELY slow-going task.
- A big impediment to working with { RDF, Linked Data, Semantic Web } is that you have to plan your URL layout before you can begin to write down any data.
Positions
- Use a Sugiyama-based plot.
- Update the IBIS vocabulary to represent ibis:questioned-by to be a subproperty of ibis:suggests, as well as their respective inverses.
- Update the IBIS vocabulary to represent ibis:Argument as a subclass of ibis:Issue. Make the appropriate changes in the app semantics.
- Monitor changes in selected relation types in JavaScript and communicate them across forms.
- NOW we bring in JavaScript: toggle the visibility of one form over another with some kind of master switch.
- Create two forms: one to add new elements and one to connect existing ones.
- Add a "disconnect" button to each of the connections.
- Open up the Circos plot, mitigating the wasted space on one side.
- Use a Krzywinski Circos Plot.
- Use a Krzywinski Hive Plot.
- Force-directed is always a popular.
- Render the subgraph in SVG+RDFa.
- Use something like D3 to visualize the subgraph.
- Visualize a patch in the graph (a partial spanning tree) centred around the subject.
- Use SASS to manage the complexity of the CSS.
- Use the HSLuv colour palette to equalize the brightness across all hues.
- Use CSS to colour-code the different classes and properties, connecting to the embedded RDFa.
- Embed the semantic content into RDFa.
- Normalize (the inverse relations) of the immediate neighbours of the subject being represented so they're all pointing the same way, link to them, and group them in lists by predicate.
- Have each page in the web app correspond to a subject in the semantic graph.
- Use the IBIS vocabulary you wrote back in 2012.
- Design a simple protocol for representing RDF graph diffs in plain HTML form keys.
- Use JavaScript to construct RDF statement diffs and send them over with AJAX.
- Write a quick and dirty web application to abridge the process of entering RDF data.
- Use UUIDs (or some other easily-generated identifier) to name RDF nodes.
Arguments
- Users arriving from outside the system will therefore land "at" a particular element.
- Situating the user "at" a given subject gives a sense of position and orientation in hypermedia space.
- Other information systems will be able to link directly to the subject.
- Krzywinski also has a design called Circos which doesn't have the aspect ratio problem.
- These plots are easy to implement in a few hundred lines of code.
- It turns out that hive plots are not good for dynamic data: as the contents change, their aspect ratio changes dramatically, making it impossible to wrangle them into a larger graphic design. Plus they look weird.
- Force-directed graph drawing algorithms are not stable and will not produce identical (geometric) output across runs.
- Force-directed (i.e. hairball) graphs get pretty hairy pretty quickly.
- That takes care of the palette problem.
- Then we're going to have to decide how to transmit the palette to D3.
- Then we're going to have to decide how to feed data to D3.
- We can pick up the RDFa from CSS or JavaScript and use it to further manipulate the UI.
- Writing an IBIS app will provide an opportunity to kick the tires on the vocabulary. The result might actually be useful!
- An embedding protocol is a much simpler idea; we can trot the JavaScript in later, when the app is more mature.
- JavaScript is certainly dirty, but it isn't clear that it's quick: in particular, the extra fragility of developing client-side and server-side code at the same time.
- Using (e.g.) UUIDs for node identifiers means you can separate the problem of recording information from the problem of naming it.