Cylinder graph generator
Wandora's Cylinder graph generator is a special tool to create topic map structures that resemble cylinder graphs such as carbon nanotubes. Cylinder graph generator is started with Wandora menu option File > Generate > Cylinder generator. If selected, the option opens up a dialog where user can enter properties of the cylinder. Available properties are tiling, width, height and toroid. Available cylinder tilings are square, triangular and hexagonal. Cylinder tiling basically defines the length of a shortest node path required to travel around a tile hole. Width and height and positive integer numbers specifying the number of nodes (i.e. topics) along the cylinder. If cylinder is marked as toroid, Wandora connects the cylinder start with the cylinder end and the cylinder becomes a closed loop.
Example
In this example, Wandora user starts Cylinder graph generator by selecting menu option File > Generate > Cylinder generator. Wandora opens up a dialog as shown below. Wandora user enters cylinder width 8 and cylinder height 20. User selects hexagonal tiling.
Wandora user presses OK button and Wandora creates cylinder topics and associations to current topic map. Notice, Wandora doesn't connect created topics anywhere in the topic tree. Thus, user has to dig the cylinder out of topic map. User could use topic finder to look for a cylinder. Or she can start the D3 graph service module and view the cylinder graph in WWW browser. Wandora user starts the D3 graph service module by selecting menu option Server > Browse services > View service d3graph. Wandora asks whether the user wants to start the server too, and user confirms. Next screen capture views a small part of the created cylinder graph.
User can zoom the graph out with mouse. Next screen capture views all topics and associations in the Wandora after cylinder creation. The cylinder is the largest part of the graph, looking like a horse shoe. Smaller and more messy part is Wandora's base ontology. As the D3 visualization library views graph essentially two dimensional, and the cylinder a three dimensional graph, the visualization is not perfect but surprising clear anyhow.
