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Mindmapping software interchange
  • vicforumvicforum
    But be sure to check out the most extensive source of information about this on the web before posting here - you could save yourself a lot of time:

    Ask other users about exchanging mapping data between different programs.
    give links to additional information
    provide new information to be added to the above

    Vic    (@VicGee on Twitter) 
    The master list of mind mapping &
    information management software 
  • visualmappervisualmapper
    Great approach Vic, and I know this has been your aspiration for some time now.

    I do believe though that Craig Scott has accomplished much of this in and through his awesome iThoughts HD app for iPad. Craig may have unwittingly started a revolution that may change, challenge and even topple a few of the desktop developers of Visual mapping software.

    Who would have known that an app would be able to import and export to and from (a growing number) multiple products. I no longer need to have multiple desktop products; I may simply use the iThoughts app to read a file structure I don't have and export it in a file structure I already use. The mainstream developers must be concerned for sure.
  • vicforumvicforum
    The story so far

    I tweeted an old post that still has great relevance today: The initiative to facilitate exchange of mindmaps and concept maps http://is.gd/q2ZSZ0

    This started a conversation with Andrew Townley:

    @atownley: Date on the page is 2007. Any outcome of the initiative?

    @VicGee: Hello, yes, about 18 pages of info about what could interchange with what, and various file formats: http://tinyurl.com/23wzzh8

    @atownley: Thanks for the link. Interesting info. Any way to get a more concise summary or big-picture view than the diagram?

    @VicGee: I thought the diagram was 'big-picture'! What do you have in mind?

    @atownley: LOL! It's a bit too much "picture" for what I was after :) Was curious about exploring the commonalities in the exchange formats. Stuff like which ones were using shared XML vocabularies, were any using RDF, ontologies or other things--but at a glance type stuff

    @VicGee: Sounds quite specialised. The purpose of the pages is to help people who want to get from mind mapping software A to mind mapping software B. They find their desired pair on the diagram and press the appropriate (i) button, then see a page of info.

    @atownley: Ah. I'm after specific concept pivot points. If I get a chance, I'll show you what I meant. Have the raw data somewhere handy?

    @VicGee: I'll look out the spreadsheet.

    @atownley: That'd be super. With any luck (and a bit of jiggery-pokery) I can whip together something like I wanted. Thanks!
    ________________________________________________________________________________________

    Tweeting is a hard way to deal with something like this, so I've transferred the discussion to the mindmappers' forum.

    Andrew, 

    I've found the spreadsheet.  You can get it here: http://www.mind-mapping.org/interoperability-of-mind-mapping-software/Interop-web-pages-text.xls  It has three sheets of information, but I doubt if it's data-driven enough for your purposes.

    The way I put these 18 web pages together was by writing to the major mapping software vendors and asking for information about interchangeability/import/export functionaily and the schema of their map files.  Some replied, and some had information available on their site.

    To go back to the origins, a while back, I volunteered to try to co-ordinate efforts for a standard schema for mind map files if there was enough support.  There was a good deal of scepticism. Amongst those I contacted, all mind mapping software publishers, only a couple said ‘good’.  I decided I needed much more support if it was to fly, so I went with the information-repository approach announced in the post I mentioned above.  For a standard to be developed, I think that all the major players would need to agree that it's a good thing and, more importantly, commit to using it.
     

    Eric Blue was the first I know of to think of doing this.  See
    his post here:     http://eric-blue.com/blog/2007/03/the_need_for_a_common_mindmap_file_format.html

    but eventually he decided to go with a web viewer
    approach:     http://eric-blue.com/blog/2007/12/mindmap_viewer_plugin.html


    I knew of another initiative, called MindSet, organized by Andrius Kulikauskas of Minciu Sodas  http://www.ms.lt/news.php but that seems to have gone now.  They said "We are now pursuing our standard effort through TopicMaps.Org", but topic maps are not mind maps - closer to concept maps, and a very formal standard and more focused on using XML data directly rather than a graphical presentation.   

    I then organized the information in a spreadsheet to help me assemble the text for the web pages.

    But it's text-oriented, because what I wanted to do was provide an information source for anyone wanting to interchange between two specific mapping products.  I reckoned that this would be done in one of three ways:
    1. Finding that product B could import product A's maps. A > B
    2. Finding a common format (often FreeMind) that would act as an intermediary A > FreeMind > B
    3. Making an XSLT translator, if A and B both had a published XML schema
    The aim was not for an overarching review of how the software publishers classify their map components which wouldn't help people much unless I were able to go on to produce some product that helped users transfer maps . . . which frankly I can't do.

    Vic
  • atownleyatownley
    Hi Vic,

    This is all very interesting--especially as someone who's been heavily involved with interoperability standards to facilitate information exchange for a number of years.

    Thanks for posting a link to the spreadsheet, and I see what you mean.  It may take a good bit more jiggery-pokery than I'd first anticipated to do what I wanted.  Still a good bit of the information is there.

    As someone also involved in the Topic Maps community, I agree with Andrius and Steve Pepper (commentor on Eric's post) that Topic Maps would be a good potential way to facilitate this common format.  However, don't get too caught up in XTM as the representation format.  You could also use RDF+OWL.  From a quick google search, this would appear to be what MindRaider is doing.  The representation isn't nearly as important as the ontology.

    I actually find it a bit shocking that an application (or two) is the interoperability solution rather than trying to come up with some kind of interchange.  What you're really talking about is creating some kind of ontology to describe the basic elements of the mind map (which I think would be rather easy to do), and then you'd define additional ontology constructs to represent the layout and other formatting stuff (leveraging XHTML for internal formatting) and there you go.  Once you've done this, map that ontology onto a controlled XML vocabulary that's optimized for the domain and publish it somewhere--like here.

    What I was interested in mostly was storage formats and the constructs used to represent the information.  This information will require a bit deeper dive into the list in the spreadsheet. :)

    Thanks for all the additional information around the history.  Sorry to hear there's never been a critical mass of traction for the idea.  Maybe the appetite/pain isn't great enough from a user perspective to make this important.  I'll give it some more thought.

    Cheers,

    ast
  • As someone who is increasingly using mind maps to help manage various aspects of life, the ability to move data from one program to another is important. There are a lot of mind mapping programs out there, and not all of them will garner enough users to remain viable. If you picked the wrong horse, you don't want to be stuck with having to recreate your maps in another program.

    As for your interoperability map, you might want to add FreePlane, which can read Freemind maps, and vice versa, I believe.
  • vicforumvicforum
    Yes, it's true, Joe.  I treat FreeMind and Freeplane as equivalent for map interchange.  But as I understand it, neither group of developers is prepared to commit to maintaining that compatibility.

    A really useful interchange mechanism nowadays is iThoughtsHD on the iPad.  They have a long list of map filetypes they can import, and export.  So even if you don't map with it (and it's not a bad mapper) it is a low cost conversion point between many pairs of mind mapping software.  Assuming you have an iPad!

    Vic    (@VicGee on Twitter) 
    The master list of mind mapping &
    information management software
  • Thanks for the tip about iThoughts. I don't have an iPad, but it's easy enough to borrow one to do a file conversion if I need to do so. Still, I am wary about compatibility as mind map development continues. Just because a company says its app is compatible with a particular format does not mean that full compatibility exists. For example, Thinking Space (mind mapper for Android platform) claims to be compatible with .mm format, but in a very brief time of playing with it, I found a couple of serious instances where it does not play nice with maps created in Freemind or Freeplane.
  • vicforumvicforum

    Right! Compatibility is rarely total compatibility, but at least it usually avoids the need to rebuild the entire map.

    Vic    (@VicGee on Twitter)
    http://www.mind-mapping.org/ 
    The master list of mind mapping &
    information management software           

     

     

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