Dijkstra find a path to my baby's heart!
February 4, 2010 6:52 AM Subscribe
Does anyone know a good mapping software for an ontological map or a cognitive map for Mac OSX?
I'm trying to map all the elements involved in my girlfriend and my relationship and print out a giant poster as a gift for her this Valentine's.
It is going to be a pseudo hierarchical organization of events, people, places and things that have been common to us in the past.
The basic functionality I would need is for it to behave like a directed graph editing software where I can label the edges and nodes. Basic drawing management(spline controlled?) where the edges can be aesthetically placed and arranged. Color coding might be nice but not essential.
The things I've looked at (Freemind/Freeplane and Compendium) either are overkill or are heavily hierarchically based where they won't allow creation of new nodes if it is not a parent/sibling/child of a new node.
So, is there a such a software out there? Anonymous because I want for it to be a surprise.
Thanks a bunch!
I'm trying to map all the elements involved in my girlfriend and my relationship and print out a giant poster as a gift for her this Valentine's.
It is going to be a pseudo hierarchical organization of events, people, places and things that have been common to us in the past.
The basic functionality I would need is for it to behave like a directed graph editing software where I can label the edges and nodes. Basic drawing management(spline controlled?) where the edges can be aesthetically placed and arranged. Color coding might be nice but not essential.
The things I've looked at (Freemind/Freeplane and Compendium) either are overkill or are heavily hierarchically based where they won't allow creation of new nodes if it is not a parent/sibling/child of a new node.
So, is there a such a software out there? Anonymous because I want for it to be a surprise.
Thanks a bunch!
OmniGraffle will do it, but it's pricey: $100 for just the basic edition. (It used to come bundled on some new Macs, though I imagine you'd have noticed if it was on yours already.) GraphViz is free, but is automatically layout only. Also, I'm not sure if that GraphViz GUI front-end works on Snow Leopard; you might need to fall back to the command-line version.
posted by serathen at 7:57 AM on February 4, 2010
posted by serathen at 7:57 AM on February 4, 2010
Mindmeister is great, it's online, it's free. I"m not super familiar with all the technical jargon you're included (spline controlled?) so it might not be what you're looking for, but worth a shot
posted by whalebreath at 10:09 AM on February 4, 2010
posted by whalebreath at 10:09 AM on February 4, 2010
I'm not sure about your lingo either, I'm afraid. I do know that VUE (an open source project from Tufts University) is just out with a 3.0 release.
posted by Mngo at 10:38 AM on February 4, 2010 [1 favorite]
posted by Mngo at 10:38 AM on February 4, 2010 [1 favorite]
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they won't allow creation of new nodes if it is not a parent/sibling/child of a new node.
The pro version of mindnode ($20) will let you do this.
posted by special-k at 7:06 AM on February 4, 2010