Filemap

proposal updated 2/3/2017

Hugh Feng hzfeng@ucsc.edu

Introduction

This is a two part project, however the end goal is only to have at least one of the parts finished if there is no time

Part one: file directory map

The file directory system used by most operating systems exists as either a single tree or multiple trees. Unix systems contain all files, including mounted drives under a single root directory, while windows marks roots with drive letters. Both systems are made of directories as branches and filenames as leaves, where each node actually represents a location on the storage device. The user accesses these nodes using a file browser of some sort, most likely using the navigational file manager included with the OS.

The goal for part one is to create a visualization of the directory tree. I plan to show the file tree in a actual tree format, similar to the image shown below. This will ensure that part two has a framework for visualization, as both share a similar structure in data. It should be noted that similar visualizations have already been created in the programs fsn and fsv in 1990 and 1999 for unix systems. Since I am somewhat obsessed with originality, the finished visualization will be differeent than those two.

Relating to this class, it will be a tree mapping of files. I'll likely use color for distance. It will most likely be 2d unless the files are too numerous to fit in a frame.

Part Two: web map

The Internet is a system of interconnected computers and servers world wide. To navigate the internet, web browsers include an address bar that allows users to type in a url to access another site. With our current conveniences such as web searches and social media, the usage of the address bar for urls declined as more people began to rely on url links to access new websites. Although this is my own opinion, I believe that links provide enough options to traverse throughout the internet.

This would be the main part of the project. My goal is to create a visualization of links, and use each web page to travel to as many websites as possible. This is to create a true visualization of the phrase "world wide web" The visualization should use the same or similar framework as the file viewer, however it is much easer to test and build on a system I control, thus for the sake of time I must create a file visualization. The final application should be a real time visualization showing the possible paths from a current web page.

Implementation

While I had initally planned on using d3 for this and making the visualization trivial, javascript is not a good language for making non web applications. After careful consideration of time and requirements, I have decided on C++ with GLFW and openGL, as I have experience with these libraries.

As for the part two data collection, there are two methods of getting an active url.

I will be using the former, as it is better for cross platform usage

Goals, aka Features

Other Goals, aka fun,optional things to implement

Timeline

Friday Objective
Feb 3 Proposal, file directory(Done on windows already)
Feb 10 GUI/Tree renders
Feb 24 URL tracker
March 3 graph renders
March 10 and 17 Buffer week/ Other goals time
March 20 Completion
Like I said in class, I'm still of the belief that this is a really easy project,not medium+, which is why the timeline is somewhat short. If I do finish on time, I'll try to add more visualizations from the data.

References

there are not that many research related references, however there are many similar projects.