Anyone recommend some software?

[andrewducker]

My brother is looking for some software - anyone think of decent software that does this?

I can think of a big diagram and linking together all the individual parts so that it creates a map of the system and then what makes up those parts and then what makes up those parts until you get down to a level of granularity that actually is useful.
 
E.g. the World is made up of continents, on each continent there are factions, each faction owns lands, armies and people,  Each faction has an ethos.  Each land is made up of regions.  Each region has a number of towns and cities.  Each City is controlled by a Group.  Each group has a leader, a Name, and a number of players in it.
 
And so on down in detail. 
 
You could have a massive database of this... but I'd prefer some kind of picture representation.  Even better one that you can focus on the individual parts (zoom in and out so to speak).

Comments

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

Sounds basically like a GIS system, assuming your example is indicative of his data being geographical (or at least being represented pseudo-geographically).

For example, in our software we have a County boundary layer, parish boundaries, street maps, woods and then trees. Each can have attributes (species = ethos etc) and you can link the hierarchy as well as having non-feature tables in the Geodatabase which can link to feature attributes. Now ESRI's ArcMap isn't cheap but there are open source GIS solutions out there. One of them might do the job....

http://opensourcegis.org/ might have something useful

[andrewducker]

I suspect that'll be way too heavyweight for him - I think he wants something more like Visio, but with the ability to black-box things, and then zoom in/out to see levels of detail.

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

How about something like this: http://autorealm.sourceforge.net/

It's GIS tuned to the needs of the RPGer. Same principles as what I do, but for fantasy maps.

(I'm presuming by his mentioning "players" this is all in a gaming context)

[andrewducker]

Oooh, that looks like fun. Cheers!

[zornhau.livejournal.com]

Freemind.
http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Also, the more impressive but a tad squirmy
http://www.thebrain.com/?gclid=CP-Uqt6ZtqMCFUte4wodtFiHbw

In general, he's after MindMapping software.

[andrewducker]

Cheers!

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

Never mind Andy's brother, I might go have a play with those :)

[meltie.livejournal.com]

Freemind's a bit Java-y but it's good.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

Omnigraffle might fit the bill too.

Though not sure how good it is.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

If you want something lightweight, I do that kind of thing with Zim and graphviz. You can create a desktop wiki in flat text file formats in zim, and if you have graphviz installed it will then automatically export a map of the relations between wiki entries which links back to them.
Most mindmapping software will do that sort of thing, but zim+graphviz makes it trivially easy to do, and both should be in the repos of any reasonable distro. They're also both useful for other things.
(If your brother doesn't use GNU/Linux, then Zim can be downloaded from http://zim-wiki.org/downloads.html and graphviz from http://www.graphviz.org/ )

[kmusser]

GIS will do that, but it does have a pretty hefty learning curve - the mindmapping software is probably the way to go.