Quick Info

• What's this all about then?
  3Trace is Information Visualization software.
• So it's gonna run in Flash or Java or something, right?
  It's is being written for Mac OS X 10.4 or later, with quite a bit of reliance on Cocoa, so ... no. ("How quaint," said a friend when he heard my big software project was not web-based.)
• What's the big idea?
  It starts with the idea that the structure of information is holarchical.
• So what?
  3Trace analyzes information in terms of containment hierarchies and referential networks.
• What about tagging?
  Tagging/metadata is currently supported and is considered orthogonal to the general containment and reference graphs. It's not clear how it fits into the big picture just yet.
• What information?
  3Trace has a plugin architecture; current plugins pull data from Wikipedia, Flickr, and Del.icio.us. The app will include a plugin SDK so anyone can write plugins for new datasources. You can also always add information by hand.
• What's it look like?
  The visualization renders holarchical information in 3 dimensions using force-directed graphing techniques. Structural containment is mapped graphically into dimensional containment ( ... with a bit of license after 3 dimensions). Reference is represented with edges and rubber-band attraction.
• Where are the screenshots?
  Coming soon, I hope!
• Is this the next revolution in [yadda yadda yadda]?
  I sort of doubt it. I'm hoping it will be a fun little toy, but it will probably not actually be, well, useful for anything. It's an exploration, an experiment, and so on. It's also my master's thesis.
• Release date?
  Um.