DWZ 1.6.2 Released Today

The main changes since the 1.5.x releases are: 

• More robust:
  The Computer Assisted Thinking has been improved and now it runs exactly when needed. Uses much less memory. The same happened to auto-linking words in the wiki text. It's now simply correct.
• Better graph:
  Now also shows, what you cannot see :-) Yes, really, we added lines from nodes leading to nowhere, so you see which nodes are worth to explore. See the sample image from the coffee-example.
• Minor: MathJAX support added.

With this milestone, we can soon add new features on top.

Image: New lines from items to nowhere show instantly, where more connections can be explored (and what kind and how many).

Relations Cheat Sheet for DenkWerkZeug

The Built-in Relations in DenkWerkZeug can be a little confusing at first. So here is a one-page explanation.

• The idea is, you choose the best relation. Are two things related at all? Then simply use "is related" to capture that. 
• You want to express in a little more detail how and why the items are related? Decide if the two things are rather similar to each other or rather different. If they are different, decide who links to whom and use "links to".
• To express even better why and how to items are related, you just go down the image and decide in which relation type your situation fits best. 

If you have little time or energy to be precise, you can always use rather generic relations. If you are precise, the more precise relations imply the relations above them. 

You can extend this hierarchy at any point with your own relations. Just say "my new relation, is subtype of, some existing relation". 

Download Relations Cheat Sheet

Feedback is always welcome.

For Semantic Web Nerds

In DenkWerkZeug 1.4.1, which was released 5 minutes ago, we added features for semantic web nerds. You can now

• Import RDF files
• New: Import the built-in RDF(S) 1.1 or OWL 2 ontologies with just one click
• Control the URI used when exporting to RDF.
• Effectively, DenkWerkZeug is now a kind of light-weight ontology editor. It's not an RDFS or OWL editor, as it cannot handle many of the subtle details in RDF(S) and OWL, but it can import all RDF files. And re-export them.

Of course, we also fixed some bugs and made some UI improvements. Thanks Jörg S. and Olaf G. for the feedback here.

If you care mostly about the graph and the semantic relations, this release is for you. For our die-hard wiki fans, one of the next releases will bring much-awaited improvements.

Automatic Mind Graph - Explore Your Ideas

So many features have been added and improved since we spoke last time. The release of DenkWerkZeug V 1.4.0 marks another milestone. Let's review the new features:

⬣ My personal favorite feature for February is the Visual Mind Graph. It takes the item that you opened, explores the neighbors, decides how many items fit in your current browser windows, spiders more neighbors and links, finds repeating patterns in the graph, uses colored nodes instead of links, auto-generates a caption to explain the node color, find frequently used link types, uses colors for those. If the simplified graph got small enough for some more nodes, more nodes are added. Finally, the graph is thrown into a force-directed layout engine and arranged on the screen. With auto-beatified item labels. 

All this happens when you just click on any item. The result looks like this:

⬣ The Tag Cloud now has controls for showing only the most important tags (or more tags). Also grouped into three categories: items, relations, properties:

⬣ The documentation DenkWerkZeug for Beginners has been overhauled, styled and since today release to the general public. It was just reachable from DenkWerkZeug before.

⬣ For storing a knowledge file a new format, the Knowledge Graph Interchange Format (KGIF) was specified, designed, implemented and released. Each knowledge file is now stored in a single XML file, which you can even read with any text editor. XML has been designed for data interchange and has a rich set of tools to convert it into other formats.

⬣ Import/Export from/to RDF (Resource Description Format) has been added. Another major new feature. More import and export formats are planned. What is your favorite one?

⬣ Soo many small little fixes. Disabled buttons you cannot click at that moment, removed menu items that are not needed, added little tool-tips for most buttons, and even improved the shutdown function. Creating new and opening existing knowledge files is much faster now.

⬣ Finally, the website where you can download DenkWerkZeug for free was styled and updated and is now the default website for www.denkwerkzeug.com. This blog has been moved to news.denkwerkzeug.com.

⬣ Now grab a coffee (and the example knowledge file on coffee) and see with your own eyes, what DenkWerkZeug can do for you.

Enjoy V 1.4.0,

The DenkWerkZeug Team

Thanks to Nicole S. for pushing us to write this post.