Open source is definitely the way to go with EoL, of course.  But I was thinking more in terms of the presentation style.  Not for scientists, necessarily, but for "regular folk" who want to be able to navigate the deep/righ world of biodiversity informatics in an intuitive way.  If the schematic.com approach is scalable (by several orders of magnitude -- both in breadth and depth), then I think it has great potential.  I'm thinking of tumbnail images of (say) species on each of the tiles, which when zoomed out far enough meld together into representative thumbnails of families...and so on.  The maginified highlight for trees are also very functional and intuitive.
 
Rod page had another dynamic interface a couple years ago, but I forget the name.
 
Rich

From: Shorthouse, David [mailto:dps1@ualberta.ca]
Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2007 12:22 PM
To: 'Richard Pyle'; 'Rebecca Shapley'; tdwg@lists.tdwg.org; 'Denise Green'; bmishler@berkeley.edu
Subject: RE: [tdwg] Interesting example of tree navigation

Indeed, this sort of Flash/Flex-based application is on the table...but, I find this a bit like mystery meat navigation. More specifically, I have been in touch with developers of Mindomo (http://www.mindomo.com) for use in EoL’s WorkBench environment using Adobe’s AIR for a desktop/web hybrid. Mind maps, tied down with Semantic Web technologies like that used in MindRaider (http://mindraider.sourceforge.net/index.html) are what I’m aiming for.

 

Cheers,

 

David P. Shorthouse

------------------------------------------------------

Department of Biological Sciences

CW-403, Biological Sciences Centre

University of Alberta

Edmonton, AB   T6G 2E9

mailto:dps1@ualberta.ca

http://canadianarachnology.dyndns.org

http://www.spiderwebwatch.org

http://ispiders.blogspot.com

------------------------------------------------------

 

From: tdwg-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Richard Pyle
Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2007 2:43 PM
To: 'Rebecca Shapley'; tdwg@lists.tdwg.org; 'Denise Green'; bmishler@berkeley.edu
Subject: RE: [tdwg] Interesting example of tree navigation

 

WOW!!  Very slick!!!  EoL should be all over this!

 

I would say the whole page is a useful model -- not just the tree part (by which I assume you meant the "Project Process" tile). The whole approach to organizing and presenting (i.e., zoom & pan) information is wonderful!  It took a little "getting-used-to", but once I got the hang of it, I really liked it.

 

I gather that it's Flash? (I mean in the Macromedia/Adobe sense ... I already know it's "Flash" in the slang sense.)

 

A little sluggish -- but well worth it, I think.

 

Aloha,

Rich

 

From: tdwg-bounces@lists.tdwg.org [mailto:tdwg-bounces@lists.tdwg.org] On Behalf Of Rebecca Shapley
Sent: Thursday, September 13, 2007 10:25 AM
To: tdwg@lists.tdwg.org; Denise Green; bmishler@berkeley.edu
Subject: [tdwg] Interesting example of tree navigation

This is not only a fascinating website in general, but in one spot has a quite novel - not perfect, but nicely innovative - interaction model for a tree of information.  Does a decent job of both showing the overview of information available and offering more information at various levels, in context, in response to interaction.
http://www.schematic.com/#/HowWeDoIt/ProjectProcess/

-R.