A step closer to a universal mind map file viewer?

Eric Blue has been beating the drum for some time now for a universal mind map file format, to make it easier for users of mind mapping software to easily share their files with one another, no matter what program they use. The emergence of web-based mapping tools makes this need even more urgent, he says in a recent blog post.

As a step in this direction, he has written an applet that can take a MindManager file, convert it to a FreeMind .mm file format and output it using the FreeMind Java or Flash viewer. I tried it with a simple MindManager map that I created for this occasion (unfortunately, I couldn't figure out how to embed it in this TypePad blog, so it's set up as an external link).

The output is fairly simple (because that's the way the FreeMind viewer is designed), but still it's pretty intriguing to think that FreeMind could potentially be used as the "Rosetta Stone" to enable the kind of universal map file access that Eric envisions. Cool!

Comments

[Lone McCord]

Now if we could get that in combination with http://freemindshare.com/ - that would be really cool...

Freemind beta allows you to import a mindjet mindmap and save it. I like freemind's output to an open-office document more than Mindjet's output to word, so that is how I have been making that conversion.

[EricB]

Chuck,

Thanks for the write up! Great point on making it easy to embed the map viewer. I just created a new page that will generate the code for you.

http://eric-blue.com/projects/mindmapviewer/share.html

It will generate a direct url, link(href), and embedded code(iframe) very similar to Mindmeister.

Thanks!

[trondk]

I though we had (partly) accomplished this through the use of topicmaps (XTM - Topicmap XML), an ISO standard! for describing knowledge structures and associating them with information resources). As far as I know only Cmap Tools and BrainBank Learning support this. Do you know if this viewer supports Topicmaps?

[Douglas Woods]

It is a great relief to hear that I am not the only person who is frustrated by the lack of portability of maps between mindmap programs.
We have a common word-processing file format and common graphics formats.
Maybe at present no one map format is the best. So maybe we should simply develop programs that can import and edit different formats, rather like a graphics program can import and edit different image formats.

Doug
www.dougwoods.com