WPF Architecture Content Map

By Simon|Architecture, Aspiring Architect, Technology, UX|5 Comments

Yesterday, my team launched Skyscrapr – a new site on MSDN dedicated to provide guidance for readers who want to become architects.  One of the most common complaints I hear from people that are looking for articles and content on architecture is that it’s so difficult to find.  Put the term “SOA” into Google, and you’ll get about 36.5 million returned records.  An impossible number to search through if you are just looking for a particular article.

With Skyscrapr, one of the things that I’m excited about is our content map, accessible through the site.  The map is a WPF XBAP control that displays spacial relationships between all of the architect-related content on MSDN – currently about 1,500 articles and webcasts.  You can use the control to see how topics relate to each other, check out which authors are the “connectors” in our industry, and what articles people have written.

For example, the screenshot above shows how the topic of “Service Oriented Architecture” relates to other architectural topics (the closer the topic is to the center, the more related it is).  We can also create maps for authors.  The following map shows other authors that are related to Ron Jacobs (a good example, because of the number of people he has interviewed for ARCast).  Notice in the screenshot how the map shows the grouping of teams that relate (to the left and right).

Finally, you can also see how articles relate to authors.  For example, show me the articles that Scott Guthrie has written:

This is useful, especially when you find one article that you like – and you’d like to look at similar ones (either by related author or topic).

There are a few bugs to be ironed out (especially with the amount of time it takes to load, and the navigation of more than a handful of articles), but I think there is a lot of potential for using this to explore other types of data (e.g. a generic version of this that you could plug in your own entities and relationships). 

Again, you can access the map using this link.  If you are interested in learning more, I’d love to hear your feedback.