Associations, Part 1

Part 2 of the Associations tutorial provides you with a more practical overview of associations. Specifically, said tutorial will focus on the respective members of an association and their accompanying roles.

The association construct is the most powerful concept within NotesMappr but by the same token it is probably the most puzzling feature of the application. The fundamental concept of associations is simple: asserting a relationship between two notes. However, in practice, the association construct is the most misunderstood element of topics maps (and by extension, NotesMappr) so for that reason we’ll take a closer look at it.

First of all, each association is of a given type. This allows us to treat associations differently according to their type. And what’s more, each association consists of two members and each of these members plays a specific role within the association.

It’s probably best to explain associations by means of an example. Take a look at the the diagram below:

As you can, we have five members of a family: Mary, the mother and wife; Paul, the father and husband; Kate, the daughter and sister, and finally, Eric and John, both sons and brothers, respectively. For each of these members, we create their corresponding note (I will be adding a tutorial on actual note creation and management, in the next couple of days).

Creating associations

Obviously, from this tutorial’s point of view, where things start to get interesting is when we create the accompanying associations between the members of the family. Let’s start with Mary, mother and wife – we’ll create the following association (A1 in the diagram, above):

• Type: Family.
• (Destination) Member 1: Paul with role Husband.
• (Source) Member 2: Mary with role Wife. For clarity’s sake, when creating an association it is unnecessary to specify the source note (in this case Mary) as Mary is the current note and NotesMappr infers the source note to be the current note).

Take a look at the corresponding screen shot below:

As you can see, I have chosen the association type of Family followed by entering Paul as the destination note. Finally, I specified that Mary‘s role within this association is one of Wife and John‘s role is one of Husband. And that’s it, really. All you need to do is save the association and you’re done. Congratulations, you’ve just created your first association. Wasn’t difficult, was it?

Next, I’ll create the three associations between Mary and her three children, Kate, Eric and John by repeating the same steps as outlined above and providing the appropriate destination notes and roles, respectively. So, let’s create the following three associations (A2, A3 and A4 from the diagram above, respectively):

• Type: Family.
• (Destination) Member 1: Kate with role Daughter.
• (Source) Member 2: Mary with role Mother.

Followed by:

• Type: Family.
• (Destination) Member 1: Eric with role Son.
• (Source) Member 2: Mary with role Mother.

Finally:

• Type: Family.
• (Destination) Member 1: John with role Son.
• (Source) Member 2: Mary with role Mother.

And that’s it. We have created all of the associations between Mary and her family. Next, we need to examine how we can navigate these notes by means of the above-mentioned associations.

Viewing associations (and navigating notes)

NotesMappr offers two distinct ways to view the associations or linked notes of a given note: namely, Groups view and List view. Each view has a distinct advantage over the other. Take a look at the screen shot below for the List view of the note Mary:

What you see are the four notes that we linked to the Mary note: Paul, Kate and Eric and John. Navigation to a related notes is done by simply choosing the appropriate note from the list. So, if your intention is to quickly navigate between notes, select the List view and choose the note that you are interested in (for all intents and purposes, List view could also be called “Shortcuts” view).

What then, is List view’s disadvantage? The obvious lack of any kind of semantic information with regards to the linked notes. You can’t see, for example, what Kate‘s role is in relation to Mary. And that is exactly where the Groups view comes into its own. That is, it provides a breakdown of a note’s associations by association type and its accompanying member roles, respectively.

The Groups view itself, is separated into two distinct (but related) views. The first view or screen, displays a list of all of the different association types. In the current example, for the Mary note, there is only one association type: Family. In all likelihood, in a real-life scenario, you would probably have several association with different types for a given note (and I’ll expand on the current example later on, showing just that). In the meantime, check out the screen shot of the initial Groups view for the Mary note, below:

The next step is to select from the list, the association type (in this case, Family) which will cause the application to drill-down and display all of the corresponding member roles for the selected association type. Take a look at the following screen shot to see what that looks like:

What you are seeing are the roles that we defined in the previously created associations (Daughter, Husband and Son, respectively). Opening the role entries (by tapping on the right-pointing arrow on the left) will display the corresponding notes for each role. The screen shot below shows you what that looks like:

To navigate to a note (Kate, Paul, Eric or John), simply select it from the list.

And there you have it… semantically linking and subsequent navigation of notes in a relatively straightforward fashion.

Extended example – multiple association types

Finally, just for comparison’s sake, I’m going to add two more notes to the John note to exemplify multiple association types for a given note. Take a look at the diagram below to follow the example:

Let’s create the first of the two additional associations for John that is involved in two projects; one for his university (Project X) and the other one, a personal website (Project Y):

• Type: Project.
• (Destination) Member 1: Project X with role University.
• (Source) Member 2: John with role Student. Remember, when creating an association it is unnecessary to specify the source note (in this case John).

See the accompanying screen shot below:

And finally, we create the second association:

• Type: Project.
• (Destination) Member 1: Project Y with role Website.
• (Source) Member 2: John with role Developer.

For clarity’s sake, all of the (individual) associations between John and his family and projects, respectively, can be depicted as follows:

Now, let’s examine the corresponding associations from within the Groups view. Take a look at the following screen shot:

As you can see, there are two association types, Project and Family. Obviously, if you drilled down the Family association, you would see the four roles Mother, Father, Sister and Brother with the corresponding notes Mary, Paul, Kate and Eric, respectively.

However, if we drill down the Project association, you will see the Website and University roles, with the corresponding notes Project Y and Project X, respectively. Take a look at the corresponding screen shot:

And that’s it. Semantic linking by means of associations. In summary, association types denote the kind of relationship you are establishing and (member) roles specify the roles that each note (member) will play within the association.

And that basically concludes the Association tutorial. If you still have any questions with regards to NotesMappr’s associations, leave a comment below and I will try to answer them.