Upgrade StorageVisualizing metadata with network graphs
The Zotero Maps plugin got me thinking about other cool stuff we could do with document metadata. As it is, Zotero allows a user to record a document's authors, the item and website type, etc. as well as add user-defined tags for ease of reference. Even in a relatively small collection of documents (say, 30-50), there's potentially a LOT of structured information just waiting to be accessed and visualized. Would it be feasible to build a plugin to represents that knowledge in the form of a social network graph? It would be nice to be able to click on a button and see a graph that represents authorship networks (to identify cells of collaborators who publish papers together) or shows the associations between authors and user-defined tags, or tags and papers, etc.
There's another discussion that covers this sort of issue already (http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/12606/a-general-idea-how-to-organize-articles-to-connect-them-within-a-network/), and I would certainly love to see a feature that represents unidirectional relationships as arrows. But there are also bidirectional relationships ("X published a paper with Y" implies "Y published a paper with X", for example) that look like they would be easier to implement. Just being able to define an abstract relationship ("draw a line between any author and any tag that appear in the Info panel for the same paper") would make me happy.
There's another discussion that covers this sort of issue already (http://forums.zotero.org/discussion/12606/a-general-idea-how-to-organize-articles-to-connect-them-within-a-network/), and I would certainly love to see a feature that represents unidirectional relationships as arrows. But there are also bidirectional relationships ("X published a paper with Y" implies "Y published a paper with X", for example) that look like they would be easier to implement. Just being able to define an abstract relationship ("draw a line between any author and any tag that appear in the Info panel for the same paper") would make me happy.
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ajlyonThis would be make a great plugin, but it's unlikely to be done by the folks at Zotero central, since they have their plates full with core functionality. Fortunately, anyone with skills and/or funding can contribute new plugins, and the Zotero crew has always been encouraging of new development of that sort.
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