Since this is an abstract vision, I wanted to just bring awareness of an area that I’ve had experience in. I don’t think it needs to be addressed in the article but wanted to share.
There are systems/business modeling languages (SysML, BPMN) that implement structured visual modeling concepts that do define explicit and reusable relationships. So, with these systems, you are building the model visually, which is then turned into a database under the hood that can be queried, generate reports, etc. With Fibery and other general-purpose tools you are modeling the relationships and entering the data more directly, then generating visualizations from that database. So it is generally coming at this from the opposite direction.
So, my comments are just:
- There are attempts to generally tackle this unified domain-modeling and integration (SysML specifically), but Fibery and related tools make this more accessible. Just being aware of that kind of tool might help with ideation or whatever. In the DoD world, wholistic domain-wide Model-Based Systems Engineering using SysML is being pushed heavily to solve the same problems you are trying to solve for a different audience.
- This is just an opinion, but I think this statement isn’t really consistent with my experience: “There are some exceptions, like Notion and Coda, they work with both to some degree, but I’d say they are closer to the unstructured world so far.” I think people might commonly use them from an unstructured standpoint, but the differences compared to fibery seem more how the UX promotes the use of the product and visualizes the data, rather than having significant functional modeling differences. I see them as having more similarities in structural modeling capabilities than differences when looking at them from an outsider perspective. This is as someone that has read the blog posts outlining the differences, which is a great, detailed walk-through.
- I’d be hesitant to say “It’s possible to unify visual data representation with just 6 Views: Hierarchical List, Board, Timeline, Calendar, Table, and Chart/Report.” For example, even in this article, you use a graph diagram that visualizes the relationships between entities. This is not an unstructured diagram, and is similar to a UML object diagram. This diagram is close to what your whiteboard supports, but iirc it only can show certain relationship types. So, I think that at least one missing key visualization type would be a generalized graph diagram. You are very close to having that already though with the whiteboard entity tree component, but that is a tree not a graph.
Questions:
- I am really liking the direction in the Headless CMS world. In the past, they were built to publish Blog Posts for the most part, but now there are many that support general modeling of any concept. (Sanity.io, Contentful, Strapi, Kentico, etc.) They often have many similar functions to build general domain models, visualize the data within workflows, then expose the data via an API. This isn’t a far cry from what Fibery can be leveraged to do, so I’m curious if you have thought at all about how Fibery fits in compared to some of these general content management solutions.