I had some unexpected extra time available, so I wrote a thesaurus roamer reminiscent of the classic ThinkMap Visual Thesaurus. The data for the thesaurus comes from thesaurus.com, by way of dappit.com (using the data mapper thesaurusreferencecom2. The UI is well, um, a springgraph. I’ve added a couple of new some ideas for presenting and navigating the history of items that you’ve visited. As usual, the source code is available by right-clicking.

The Roamer component is where the new history handling takes place: back/forward controls, a way to display the history in other components, and better control over how history items appear on the screen. The SpringGraph component now gives you a way to create different views for different kinds of items.

It’s been a month since I published the first version of the SpringGraph graph visualization component for Adobe Flex, and many of you have written comments, questions, compliments (thanks!) and some very good ideas. This new build of the SpringGraph and Roamer components incorporates several improvements inspired by your feedback.

The big new “feature” is the autoFit mode, which you can see in action in the updated RoamerDemo. Open a big file and crank up the “max degrees of separation” so there are lots of items on the screen. As you double-click to browse through the graph, notice how everything stays nicely fitted onto the screen. If you adjust the ‘item separation’ slider to force things offscreen, the component will gradually re-adjust things so that everything fits again. You can turn on and off autoFit mode to see the difference in behavior.

You can now tell Roamer (the component that allows you to browse very large graphs) to automatically make visible all the items you’ve visited, sort of a bread-crumb trail. In the RoamerDemo, these are the items highlighted in blue. Also, Roamer now gives you a way to show or hide individual items. This is something you could take advantage of in your own application.

I added some notes in the docs for SpringGraph discussing a few different ways of controlling the appearance of links. It’s still not very good, but it’s a start. Let me know your ideas.

Please feel free to post comments, questions, bug reports, etc. I will try to respond as soon as I can. Have fun!

This component is the result of an ongoing experiment in exploring the information of the internet as a set of interconnected data. This is not the same as web browsing, which focuses on websites and pages of data. This is web “roaming” - exploring data by the connections from one piece of information to another. This is exemplified by the Amazon roamer, with which you can roam the Amazon product database by following the “similar products” links between products. When you play with it a little bit, you’ll notice how the data groups itself into clusters, and how sometimes only a few links can take you to a very different product area.

There are actually 2 Flex components in the download. SpringGraph is the main component - you give it a graph of items and links, and specify the Flex UI for displaying each item. The graph can be given as XML, or built from the Graph class. The UI can range from as a single MXML tag, all the way to a complex component. The component follows the dataProvider/itemRenderer pattern seen in other Flex components such as DataGrid or List, with one difference - the dataProvider is a graph rather than an array.

The other component is called Roamer. It is a subclass of SpringGraph, and adds the abilty to filter the view to a small neighborhood around the ‘current’ item. This makes it possible to load in a huge graph and then view it a little bit at a time. The Roamer Demo shows a couple of examples, one with 12,000 items and one with 26,000.

This component is also available for download from the Adobe Exchange. Thanks to everyone who has already downloaded it, I hope it’s working OK for you. I’ve made several updates to the component, so make sure you have the latest version. And special thanks to the 5 generous people who gave SpringGraph a 5/5 rating!