CODEWITHSUNDEEP
opmloutlinermindmap
newnomad
newnomad

Reputation: 1073

Can flowcharts with crosslines be noted as OPML?

Is there a standard to reference cross-lines in a mindmap or flowchart in OPML.For example with anchors and links. It seems that flowchart editors online such as gliffy can import OPML but export is only xml, not OPML. Put simply: can this flowchart be coded in OPML, or is OPML limited to outlining without cross references?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 255

Answers (1)

tangentstorm
tangentstorm

Reputation: 7305

Put simply: can this flowchart be coded in OPML...?

Yes, but you'd have to come up with your own conventions for how to encode it, and no outline software would know how take advantage of the convention.

The absolute simplest encoding would be a triple store, which you usually think of as a table of 3 columns, but in OPML could look like this:

  • level 1: subject: just list every node in the network
    • level 2: predicate: list the types of arcs coming out of each node.
      • level 3: object: list the end points for each type of arc for the subject node.

You probably also want to give the nodes a key so you're not repeating the same long labels over and over again (just like normalizing a database).

In the specific example you gave, it might look like this:

  • #1
    • text:
      • is there a problem?
    • ifso:
      • #2
    • else:
      • #3
  • #2
    • text:
      • "Pour yourself a drink."
    • next:
      • #4
  • #3
    • text:
      • "Excellent! This calls for a drink."

(etc.)

If you want to know more about this concept, RDF is a generalized standard for projecting graphs into a tree structure.

You can absolutely lift RDF up into OPML, but RDF-specific tools can take advantage of the graph structure and actually do something with it, whereas outliners only deal with trees and probably can't take advantage of the extra information.

However, there are some outlining tools that are built on a graph model. Tinderbox for mac is one example.

Upvotes: 0

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