[Uml-devel] Re: karbon14 and uml

[Andrew Sutton]

man... i'm really losing it. i thought rob was copied on the last email. i 
can't keep anything straight any more. okay, rob and lenny and others. i 
really like k14. good design. needs more comments :)

anyways, lenny and dirk, you're on this because it ties into some konquerer 
stuff and i thought you might be able to provide feedback.

anyways, here's

my uml viz research talks about 2 things that i don't think any other 
applications ever deal with - not explicitly anyways. the first is 
architectural framework views (afv). i have to mention this because it ties 
in a little bit to the rest of the conversation. an afv represents a view of 
some subset of the model. we typically partition these views into packages 
within the model. i should note now that in [almost] every other uml app, 
packages are allowed to contain diagrams. so if you look at, say the Use Case 
View, you might expect to see some diagrams underneath that node in the model 
tree along with some actor objects and use case objects.

the other is diagram management. every uml app that i've seen does a really 
crappy job at diagram management. everybody just puts diagrams into the model 
tree (the tree view at the left of the window) to mingle with the other model 
elements that have been created for the model. this isn't terrible, but it 
ignores the basic concepts of what a diagram really is - a document. we've 
got great tools and great ui's for document management in kde. namely, 
konquerer.

part of the research paper i'm writing specifically addresses visualization 
techniques for document management. if we consider the nested structure of 
packages and diagrams, then we can talk about a hierarchical data set - or 
something not unlike a file system - and yes, konquerer is getting the lions 
share of the publicity in this section ;)

what i've been thinking is that u2 should support these techniques for 
document management - in short, embedding konquerer's file browser as a view 
and virtual file system on top of the model. of course, i'd love to take 
advantage of the tabbed windows too... by doing this we should be able to get 
some really good, and really familiar diagram management capabilities 
(right?). any thoughts on viability or possibility?

the reverse of this is even more interesting - that is building an XMI plugin 
for konquerer. consider browsing your home directory and coming across an XMI 
file. you click on it and instead of opening with umbrello, it takes you into 
a virtual file system with the packages and the diagrams. maybe you don't 
want to see it as that way, so you change the view to architectural browsing 
mode (or something). now you could be looking at dynamically generated web 
pages that allow you to browse the architecture of the system. just thoughts. 
i think that would be cool as shit, but that's me.

oh... one thing about both of these. u2 is going to have to support the 
ability to thumbnail diagrams - otherwise these just won't work. of course, 
if our shapes can generate svg, then it shouldn't really be an issue :)

finally, i have to bring up a much feared term: "treemaps". i know that in the 
past treemaps have not been a very popular visualization for hierarchical 
data, but i've actually found one that works pretty well: photomesa 
(http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/photomesa/) it's good stuff - really pretty good.

anyway, i'm getting off my soapbox for now...

andy