============================ Fenfire UI vision -- my take ============================ :Author: Benja Fallenstein :Date: 2003-09-14 This is a document briefly describing how I am envisioning the full Fenfire user interface, at the moment. The basic thing is the Loom structure, the "zz views for RDF:" Nodes shown in a focus+context view, which you can move through, and you can select which RDF properties to show, swapping them in and out as you go. This already enables many useful things: Storing addresses, birthdays, telephone numbers, IBIS argument structures (e.g., X is a proposed resolution to issue Y), TODO lists, bug lists, project schedules, budgets etc. Then we have applitude-specific views: Views that show one kind of information structure in a nicer way. For example, events in time on a calendar, or on a spiral like Ted has proposed; or events on a map (at the points where they have happened/will happen); or a chart of the things in our budget. Actually, views will try to be as general as possible, and often useful for more than one applitude. For example, we'll have table views, and the chart view will be able to show many kinds of data, and of course we'll have spatial canvas views, which will enable us to place *anything* on a 2D canvas. We'll be able to switch between the different views of a thing, most likely through a menu. (Cycling through them as in ZZ will not do when we have many of them.) We'll choose a view from a menu, and often we'll set a couple of view parameters: For example, we'll tell the table view which RDF properties to show in the columns (like in the Loom views), we'll tell the chart view which properties to show graphically, and so on. Now, each of these views will tell the system which vobs correspond to which node in the RDF graph. This will allow us to *annotate* these views. For example, below each event, we could show the money that we spend on this event, in small, red digits. **In any view showing this event.** It doesn't matter whether the event is shown in a calendar view, in a spiral time view, in a table view, in a chart view, on a spatial canvas, or in a basic Loom view: The expense for that event will always float below it in small red digits. Like choosing which properties to show in a Loom view, the user will choose from a set of selections which annotation views to show at any time, switching them on and off as they like. The most important annotation view will not be that money view, though. It will be the basic Loom view. If you have an event in your calendar, and you want to record that this event is a meeting with Carli, then you simply make an RDF structure to that effect-- subject: the meeting; property: ``event:with``; object: Carli, say. Then, you tell Fenfire to show the ``event:with`` property. No matter which view you're using, when the event is shown somewhere, the RDF connection to Carli will be shown-- as a buoy.