Scottish Local Council Electoral Wards – General, Geographic & Electoral Knowledge Atlas (30 Sep 2019)

We create our digital knowledge maps linking to 100’s of public domain knowledge resources about the ‘building blocks’ of Scotland using MindManager, the market leading information mapping software for over 20 years. One of MindManger’s many unique features is the ability to publish a knowledge map as an HTML5 document that…

• retains all of the knowledge, and most of the interactivity, of the original.
• is viewable in any modern browser, on any device, as a stand-alone webpage that doesn’t require any external plug-ins or internet connection to ‘work’ (ie. they can be viewed offline).
• can be embedded in an existing webpage using a standard i-frame and URL (whilst being hosted elsewhere).
• can be shared in the usual ways that files are shared, including being sent as an email attachment.
• is ‘thumb friendly’ for viewing & interacting on touch screen devices such as mobile phones.

If you have not encountered an HTML knowledge map before, treat it like a Google Map. You can pan about, zoom in and out, and clicking on map branches will activate content (single hyperlinks, multiple hyperlinks, notes, embedded data feature toggles etc.). Notes & hyperlinks will open up in a side panel in the browser window (mobile users – see ‘Tips For Mobile Users’ below).

We make the HTML versons of our maps available to the world for free by publishing them within ‘map blog posts’ on the ScotlandtheMap.info WordPress blog website. This video explains the layout of the posts and how the maps can be viewed online as a stand alone page in your web browser, or downloaded to your device and viewed offline at your convenience.

As stated already our HTML knowledge maps are “thumb friendly and viewable in any modern browser, on any device”. Here are a few extra tips to enhance your user experience if viewing maps on a small touch-screen device…

1) Vertical Scrolling Of Webpage – If your ‘scrolling thumb’ is anywhere within the embedded map window when it slides across the touch-screen, you will pan around the map rather than scroll the webpage as a whole. To counter this there is always a narrow margin around the map panel at the edges of the screen, which you can ‘drag’ to move the page. (Viewing the map full screen in a new browser tab also gets round this issue :-).

2) Activating Branch Content – Clicking on map branches will activate content. Notes & the list of attached hyperlinks will open up in a side panel in the browser window. On mobile phones this panel can be take up a disconcertingly large proportion of the screen. If you don’t want to access this content, just click on the map background away from the activated branch, and the panel will disappear.

3) Following Hyperlinks – If there is a single hyperlink on a branch then clicking on the favicon symbol at the end once will activate it and the web resource linked to will open up in a new browser tab. If the topic has multiple hyperlinks attached (another unique MindManager feature) then these can only be followed by clicking on the link in the list in the side panel that opens up within the browser window when the branch is clicked. Note that notes and hyperlinks are on separate tabs within the sidepanel if both are present. Hyperlinks are listed in the ‘Attachments’ tab.

4) Map Content Version – Work the ‘Lo-Fi’ (most images removed) version of the map if your device has limited capacity. But that is not to say that the ‘Hi-Fi’ version can’t be viewed, and they do not work fine once they have loaded. It will just take longer for them to load, say 30s – 2 mins depending on the connection. For example we have viewed & worked with the ‘Hi-Fi’ version of the Scottish Local Councillor map – 2000+ branches, 6000+ hyperlinks, 1600+ embedded images, including a location map for all 32 councils and 324 electoral wards as well as a colour photo of every one of the 1227 councillors – on a Samsung Galaxy S7 no problem.

1) Maps In Native MindManager (.mmap) Format – Whilst our HTML maps are interactive, they are not editable. This can only be done within MindManager and the maps republished as HTML. Generally speaking ScotlandtheMap maps will be available to download in native MindManager (.mmap) format from the Knowledge Mappers map store. Click the button below the map if present to go to the map page on the store website (opens up in a new browser tab).

2) Other Information Mapping Software Users – Many other information software programmes have the capability of importing MindManager map files (MindManager was the first software of it’s type and has been the market leader for over 20 years). A word of caution however. Our maps fully utilise the large range of unique ‘information cartography’ features available in MindManager – large maps (1000’s of branches), ‘rich (ie. variable) formatting’ of topic text, multiple hyperlinks, embedded data features (spreadsheets, charts & topic properties), layout variations within the same map etc. – which are not supported by other information mapping software programs. Thus even if your program can import a MindManager file, how it copes with each of these features, and what it renders on-screen as a result, will vary from the MindManager version so user beware!