PRONOVIX

Tonight a tweet from Laura Scott lead me to a blogpost by Zack Rosen at Semantic Focus. From the first sentence it seemed a bit odd, it's been more than 12 years since Tim Berners-Lee started working on the Semantic Web and most if not all of the points that followed seemed outdated.

If you ever wrote a specification, you've come across the following problem: Once you finally built your spec you need to cut it into feature-tickets, spec units that you can properly follow in your project management system. This basically duplicates your information, in a fluent text and a ticket version. It's a lot of extra work and worst of all it disconnects your specification from your project management system.

In most cases this means that from that point on, the written document is dead: the fluid text version will never be rewritten. A recipe for a communication disaster.

As a passionate fan of mindmapping I've grown accustomed to mindmaps as a data visualization tool. Mindmap user interfaces allow you to organize your ideas into hierarchical bundles of 6-7 concepts in collapsible groups and then drill down in a logical relationship tree. This is very close to how a human brain works.