[jerf]

"I have no idea what you would use such a thing for."

Presenting graph-structured data in a way that the graph has sufficient restrictions on it to be representable usefully in a UI.

In some sense all data structures are just restrictions on graph data structures. So why not just use graphs directly more often? Because the full freedom of graphs can result in a lot of situations that are pathological for both algorithms and UIs, such as graphs that mostly have one node connected to one node, except suddenly there's a node with 1,000,000 connections, which raises obvious UI issues.

To the extent this is not used today, it's probably because in the end it's still too general and has been outcompeted by all the other UI widgets we have that take more advantage of all the menagerie of local structures we have identified. It turns out that we are generally willing to do the work to create specialized representations for those things. We do lose some generality, but, again, we seem willing to do the work to specialize, so it all mostly works out. Only a very few people are out there working with data with so little such specialized support that they are reduced to working with raw graphs directly, and they already mostly have no choice but to learn to deal with the graphs directly and would be as frustrated trying to jam them into this structure as they would any other structure that restricts graphs.

[DennisP]

Nelson's inability to deliver a product, and use of his patent to keep others from delivering a product, might also have something to do with the idea not catching on.

[aphextron]

Why does Ted Nelson need to deliver a "product"? He's not a computer scientist. He's not a product manager. He's just a goofy guy with wacky, interesting ideas. More of a philosopher than anything else.

[tuukkah]

From my point of view and as the parent said, the problem here was the patent and how that contributed to others not being able to deliver after a lot of work.