Narrator is a cross-platform desktop application to fluidly define interactive, zoomable, scale-less network diagrams (also called node-link diagrams) that communicate dependency between information in a visually compelling and consistent manner. We call these diagrams "narratives". They are represented as RDF files with links to external resources (e.g. images and documents) and can be published to the web as applets.
Narrator was originally developed by Ben Suter and John Haymaker at Stanford University, has been used by students in Dr. Haymaker's courses in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and remains the subject of further academic research at CIFE. A collection of published narratives is available at http://narratives.stanford.edu/community/.
Future plans include a server-based repository for narratives, providing multi-user collaborative read-write access and publishing for the public.
Narrator has been used to create process maps, use case diagrams, organization charts, flow charts, timelines, for non-hierarchical document organization, and to represent dependencies within a single and multiple CAD models. How will you use Narrator?
