I implemented two different ways of placing graph nodes or tree nodes using a radial layout. First I’ll the radial layout and afterwards I describe the idea of both distributions and finishing with the conclusion based on a visualization example.

Radial Layout:

The idea of radial layout is quite simple. As have a tree or a graph as data and want to show how the nodes are related together. You select one node that is placed to the center. The nodes on the most inner circle have a direct relation to the selected node. The nodes on the next circle do only have a relation to the nodes of the most inner circle and so on. The number of the circle indicates how many hops has the shortest path to the selected node.

Distribute nodes depending on leafs

In most cases graph nodes or tree nodes aren’t balanced. Space optimizations leeds to a distribution that depends on the amount of leafs.

Let me make an example:
On the first circle we have 3 nodes. Only one of this nodes has 4 childs. The other ones don’t have any. In this case we have 6 leafs that consits of the 2 nodes of the first circle without any childs and the 4 childs of the other node on the first circle. The angle of distribution is 60 degrees (360/6). The angle between the 2 nodes of the first circle are 60 degrees. The angle between the 4 childs are 60 degrees too! And the angle between the this childs and the nodes of the first circle are 60 degrees too! The sum of the degrees are 360. The angle between the node with the 4 childs and the 2 nodes of the first circle are 150 degrees.

Distribute nodes evenly

A naiv way to distributing nodes on a circle is to place distribute them evenly. All the distances between the nodes on the same circle are equal like it is for the numbers on a analog clock. On the analog clock, the hours and minutes are distributed evenly.
But visualizing more then one circle leeds to a big amount of crossing relations. The best solution will be to make the child node distribution dependend on their father nodes. The child nodes should be distributed evenly on the sector given be the node distribution of the father nodes.

Let me make an example:
On the first circle we have 3 nodes. The distance or the angles between them is 120 degrees (total degree of a circle divided by amount of nodes: 360/3). One of this nodes has 4 childs. This childs are distributed evenly on the sector of its father that is 120. That means that the the angles between this childs is 30 degrees (sector divided by amount of nodes: 120/4).

Conclusion

As you can see on the image it’s not that easy to decide what’s best. Visualizing trees or graphs that are quite balanced the evenly distribution seems to produce a better visualizing (i.e. more simple to read) because it’s more symmetric then the other one.
But in most cases trees and graphs aren’t balanced. If the distribution is evenly the nodes are concentrated on some spots the most time. Make the distribution dependend on the leafs leeds to visualization that uses the space best.
For realy small trees an evenly distribution seems to be the best choice. For big trees or graphs a distribution depending on the amount of leafs seems to be the the best choice. In most cases trees aren’t balanced and the use of the first idea better. But the second one is more easy to implement because you don’t have to calculate the amount of leafs.

Sources

Animated Exploration of Dynamic Graphs with Radial Layout

Knowledgemaps aren’t usefull in companies only. The can be used in every domain where people challenge to get knowledge. In multiplayer online games, especially in so called MMORPG like World Of Warcraft (WoW), the players suffer don’t having an easy way to get an overview of their own guild.

You have to know that in MMORPG people can build or join a guild to share their skills and help each other the finish heavy quests. In WoW people can select between various professions. Each profession (e.g. Blacksmithing, Leatherworking, Alchemist) is able to produce important stuff for other players. In a guild people share this products very cheap. If you want to buy those item on the market you would pay realy a lot. An other important reason for guilds are to build groups of 5 players to fight in so called dungeons. Dungeons are places in WoW with heavy enemies. You don’t have a chance in dungeons without planning the group. The group should consist of a healer (very important), a tank (usually a warrior) and a combination of other classes.
In a big guild it is very hard to find out who’s a healer etc.. The problem increases by the fact, that people don’t play only with one character. For example one plays as healer and plays a warrior as twink too. You can just use one of them. People loose the overview of who is who and have problems to build groups for dungeons.

Using a knowledgemap that visualizes the guild by showing the guild characters, their professions and classes, solves the problem of guild organization and aquiring guild benefits. Connecting Characters with twinks and connecting characters to professions and classes creates a knowledgemaps that helps the guild. You don’t have to know which character has got what profession or is of what class. If you are interested in some armor, liquids, food, juwelery, etc. or if you are interested in building a group for the dungeons that needs a special combination of character classes and abilites, you only have to study the knowledgemap.

In that sence, knowledgemaps leeds to a well organized guild for MMORPG, where the players effectively create dungeon teams and profit from the products of other characters professions.
In my case, I used the knowledgemap metapher to visualize the characters, professions and classes. The guild tried to publish their assets as a forum thread before. But it realy wasn’t that easy to find out what characters is only a twink, etc. by reading all the posts. Especially when people leaves the guild, delete a character or what ever the assets of the guild changes even they mention it in a post. But it’s not possible to get the status quo of the guild if you have to follow all the posts in a thread.

On the other side, a knowledmap can always show the current situation and that’s the power of it: Visualization of the status quo in the guild, ability of organizing dungeon teams and benefit from professions of the other characters.

Yesterday, I tried to apply for some tickets for the comming Euro 2008 because it was the starting time of the ticket lottery that ends the 31th of March. Well, obviously I was not the only one trying to apply the first day. I realy had to wait a lot and was putted on lots of waiting queues.

But today, on the second day, I tried it another time. Today I realy had no problems in applying for some tickets. No waiting queues no slow website, cool! But the prices for matches are quite expensive especially for the opening match and the finals. But I would pay every price or in other words as much as a students budget is able to pay .
Now I’m waiting until the end of this month. After the 31th the tickets are distributed by lottery to people applied for it. I hope I’m one of the lucky ones
You can be sure I’m publish it here if so

Playing the MMRPG World of Warcraft you get in touch with all the realy nice movies on youtube about World of Warcraft. My most favorite one is the video clip about The internet is for porn. Well, the video is far away from real porn. But it is made by people characters using emoticons. I realy like it. Check it out.

Writting papers, documentations or what ever, starts by defining a layout. The problem defining your own layout is the imagination of how the hole document will look like. Defining a layout is best made when you already have written the hole text. But in most cases you don’t have it written yet.

On solution is to use a dummy text with your layout to get the impression of the how the layout is going to look like. A good dummy text doesn’t have to make sence. It has to be like a usual text. It’s not the best idea writting some letters and copy&paste them 100 times. A good idea would be to copy&paste a text taken from an article.
But professional layouter are using the famous Lorem Ipsum dummy text in all its variations. It’s a simple latin text representing a usual text with different length of words, etc.

Lorem ipsum eu est nominavi voluptatibus, dicam admodum sapientem vim ex, vix id erat solet audire. Legere dignissim ut eam. Debitis officiis no vel, ne laoreet mandamus constituto sea. Oblique petentium periculis per cu, ad eam veritus ullamcorper, at tale inciderint vis.

Ne est intellegam temporibus, ad ius nibh luptatum evertitur. Eum elit splendide ut, eum detracto perfecto te, patrioque cotidieque eos ut. Ea qui scripserit theophrastus, sit fugit dicunt audiam no, vis at omnesque percipitur. Novum pertinax sea ea. Aliquid dissentiunt quo an. Mei eius graeco conceptam at, vim ex etiam aperiri accusam, doming alterum veritus pri cu.

Sit ad feugait facilisis corrumpit. Mel debet volutpat cu, vim probo utroque sapientem et. Eu eros dictas necessitatibus eam. Et veritus principes vis, in tollit dictas nam. Ei eam aperiri mentitum. Usu ei indoctum dissentiet.

Wisi legendos tincidunt pro an, eum option evertitur no. Odio ludus no per, duo ex posse assentior. Duo eu erant moderatius, per fugit dicunt ne, illud fabellas mei ut. Sea velit putent ut, et est putent dicunt. Pri qualisque moderatius percipitur cu, mutat feugait patrioque vim at.

Vitae vulputate vis et. Vim eu brute nostrud contentiones. Id tamquam nominavi vis, ea pro eripuit comprehensam, vocent verear facilis at vim. Vix et kasd interpretaris. Perpetua disputando duo ex, enim choro intellegam sea id.

Ne eum prima oportere, qui solum sonet interesset cu. Pertinax scribentur pri no. An qui mazim impetus, verterem gloriatur neglegentur his in, cu graece ceteros mei. Est ex graece senserit, atqui possit ex cum. Audiam appareat ullamcorper vim ut, tale paulo et per, cum mollis fabulas scripserit te.

Ex possit viderer mea, civibus persecuti eum ne. Mandamus corrumpit vis ut, usu te suas volumus consequuntur, ex sea mundi munere ancillae. Qui in vide aeterno vituperata, ne graeco vocibus pri. Partem abhorreant concludaturque vis ex. Fastidii adipiscing liberavisse ut mea, cu iisque recusabo voluptaria usu, graece graeci maiorum mei no.

Vis at ludus rationibus interpretaris, est no vituperatoribus temporibus epicurei. Labore prompta vivendo nam ad, qui tritani gloriatur ne. Ex ullum numquam albucius usu, dicat numquam nominavi has id. Odio intellegat intellegebat eu nam, cum in aeterno consetetur. Pri prompta pericula et. Mea inciderint disputando ea. Ea utamur voluptua duo, ex dolor scripserit eos.

Ut nonumy perfecto usu, tota option nonummy id usu. Eam erat laudem ut, sumo choro deterruisset qui in, ei vivendo atomorum eam. In quaeque civibus pro. Et ubique debitis ponderum duo, splendide mediocritatem eu qui. Est ne malis nusquam conclusionemque.

Ne iisque maiestatis sit, officiis scriptorem concludaturque et vim. At tota periculis cum. Doming minimum postulant has eu, gloriatur scriptorem eam eu. Omnes ridens sea ne, in albucius pertinacia ius.

This text would be the best text to set it as placeholder for your comming writtings. It is easy to defining the layout and view its influences on the upper text.

In my case, I used it for my master thesis.

Working on my master thesis about an implementation of a graph based knowledge browser I get in touch with other researching people from all over the world and publishing houses. It’s a great feeling other people admire your own work and ask for collaboration. But the research area isn’t as collaborative as it looks like. What counts in research is beeing the one that publicates first new research results of interest.

Well, why I’m writing about that? I got asked for a collaboration with a professor from another university. He works on Natural language processing (NLP) and prefers to use JSaurus for automated thesaurus generation. But I’m still working on my diploma thesis and as I was told it’s a bad idea to collaborate own research results until I didn’t have publicated yet. That’s how research work. But don’t think that has something to do with ego, no. It’s substantially important build reputation.
The reason is simply:
big reputation = more money for your research

And one way to build reputation is beeing the first presenting new results of interest.

A publishing house asked me to publicate my thesis as a monography already. The research topic I’m working on is one of big interest because it puts 3 main things together the world is currently or in the near future focused on:

• Web2.0
• Knowledge Management
• Sharepoint

Already the publishing houses watches the request trends of the market and try to get the authors very soon.

Lucky boy, you would say. Yes, I agree. The job offers I get confirm that too

I started to play World of Warcraft (WoW), a MMORG (Massive Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game), a half year ago. Now, it’s time to recapitulate the time i spent in this virtual game world.

The name of my avatar is Lúthien, a female druid beeing a night elve. Playing WoW, you have to choose in what way you want to play. There are roleplay servers and normal server. People playing on the roleplay server realy want to play the game as a true roleplay. First, all the avatars have names that follows naming conventions. You can’t name an elvish “Tungdil Steinbrecher” because that would be a typical name of a dwarve. Your behaviour should match your race too. But you’re alway free how to interpret your own character in the game In my case I’m playing a female fashionably druid, roaming forests and helping low skilled heros when they get attacked by wild animals. I’m able to transform into a fast panther, powerful bear, roaming gepard and of course a powerful Moonkin, a strange human beeing, looking like a bear going on two foots with deer antlers in an owl dress. Can you imagine? It looks quite funny ^^

I played the first two versions of Guildwars too. So I can compare them right. In Guildwars you have a very good story that is linear. In WoW it’s not that linear. You have quests and sometimes some quests that are based on other ones. You realy can play without to worry about the big story behind. It’s more a story beside the game you get by reading books you get in the game or on the internet and booklets. I would apreciate if the story in WoW would be better integrated like in Guildwars. On the other hand, you are free to create your own story and that opens lots more possibilities. Sometimes, some guilds post on their websites messages about attacking a town of another party. That’s great imagine an army of h
Humans, Elves, Dwarves and Gnomes attacking a town of Orks.

World of Warcraft is realy a great game. You can enjoy it alone. But entering a guild the game gets a new dimension of social gaming. Next weekend we have a guild meeting where the guild leader is chaning my status as invited guest of the guild to a real member of it. Well, the location isn’t known be the members, only by the leader. We’ll getting the location somewhere in the World Of Warcraft early enough. I think I should prepare a little speech on getting a member and getting into the hole conspiracy of the guild and buy some beer in the main city Ironforge of the dwarves and some fireworks from the gnomes from Gnomeregan to celebrate it with the other guild members.
So, if you find a group of drunk avatars, that’s my guild

Early in the morning I wanted to register a domain. Just for fun and very spontaniously I played with the domain registration tool at hostpoint.ch just to find a nice domain. Well, I tried ipho.ne and it was still available. It should have been my first iPhone. I was so excited and couldn’t await the confirmation that I would be the owner of ipho.ne for one year.

My dream finished some minutes ago. I got an e-mail informing me, that they can’t register this domain because of political problems in the country of Niger (.ne is the domain name of Niger).

Wir können die Domain ipho.ne aus folgende Grund nicht registrieren. Die
Domain ne ( Niger ) wird nicht mehr registriert weil im Land stets politsche
Probleme herrschen die auf einen absehbaren Zeitpunkt nicht gelöst werden
können. Die Bestellung wurde gelöscht.

I’m a little demotivated now. I have to wait until the end of this year to get such a cool iPhone. But I souldn’t be so egocentric and materialistic. People in Niger have real problems and I don’t think they are waiting for some products launches. They realy wait for solutions on on the polical level, safety & security and at least a chance to live and not always just try to survive.

Unfortunately, there’s no iPolitics in the near future. An easy to use political system that matches people needs all over the world. That’s a real challenge. It seems impossible to develop a standard solution for political systems. And democracy is realy a proprietary one with lots of different extensions and plug-ins. What about using the knowledge of software engineering of acquiring requirements and create a solution?
Think about it, I’ll do.

It’s some months ago as I published an article about my new NAS (Network Attached Storage) in my blog. After some weeks, a guy from Taiwan contacted me. He worked for the company that produced my NAS. He asked for the permission to publish my blog article on their company’s homepage. I was pretty surprised about his request because I made experiences that B2C relations ends with buying the product . Well, I realy feel supported even I don’t need support for my NAS. At the end I agreed to let them publish my article on their website:

http://www.synology.com/enu/comments/index.php

Some days after, a guy from the offical distributor of Synology in Switzerland add a comment to my blog article about my NAS and gave me some hints about running the blog software I’m using on my NAS.
I’m asking: “Is that a good CRM or is it simply good CRM?”. One guy from Taiwan from the other side of the world found my article and some days after I have contact to the swiss distributor. That’s realy great and I realy feel good that I’ve buyed this NAS.

Synology is a company that realy understood the power of blogs for product marketing. Nowhere else then in blogs are so much user comments and user experience going to published. I realy changed the way of evaluating a product I don’t now. I’m not only reading manuals and reviews of a product, I simply search for user experiences in blogs to get a true evaluation of a product.
I’m still waiting for a webservice archiving blog entries for a product I’m looking for. That would make the decission making process lot more faster and even more exactly because if you can’t test a product you never realy know what you get. At the end reading blogs is one way to minimize customers uncertainty .

Going shopping in Chur I found a mysterious lane with some strange ramps in front of each door. They all are marked with yellow lines. And that’s not enough! There were even ramps in front of gullies. I realy wonder what the purpose of those ramps are. They can’t be for people with disabilites, I think. I hope drunk people aren’t going to break their necks passing this lane on Silvester