Asset Diagram Panel

The Asset Diagram panel is used to create and visualize diagrams where nodes represent real assets and edges represent RDF property relationships between those assets.

Unlike the Simple Diagram Panel, every element in an Asset Diagram has a backing presence in the RDF graph: creating a node opens a dialog to create a new asset instance, and drawing an edge between two nodes creates an actual triple in the asset collection.

Navigation & Selection

  • Add Node: Click any empty area on the canvas to open the Create Asset dialog

  • Drag Node from tree: Drag an existing asset from the resource tree onto the canvas to add it as a node

  • Pan View: Hold Ctrl (Windows) or Cmd (Mac) and drag the canvas

  • Bulk Selection: Click and drag on an empty area to use the Marquee tool to select multiple items

Node & Edge Manipulation

  • Move Node: Click and drag the center of a node

  • Create Edge: Drag from the border of a node (blue highlight)

    • The available relationships are determined by SHACL property shapes on the source and target asset types.

    • If multiple relationships are allowed, the most recently used one is automatically selected.

    • To cancel edge creation while dragging, Right-click.

  • Delete: Select an item and press Backspace or Delete

Labels & Styling

  • Edit Node Labels: Double-click a node or an existing node label to modify its text content

  • Edit Edge Relationship: Click the label on an edge to open a drop-down and select a different relationship. Only relationships allowed by SHACL shapes between the two asset types are shown.

  • Color Styling: Select one or more nodes to reveal the Context Menu. Use the color picker to change the color of the selection

Keyboard Shortcut Summary

Action

Input

New Node

Click Canvas

New Edge

Drag Node Border

Pan Canvas

Ctrl + Drag

Edit Node Label

Double-Click

Delete Selection

Del / Backspace

The diagrams themselves are represented as assets in RDF using a dedicated diagrams ontology. Nodes become instances of diagrams:Node and edges become instances of diagrams:Edge. Nodes store the x/y position and width/height information in an extensible data model.

Nodes are linked to the asset that they represent using the property diagrams:asset. Similarly, edges store a reference to the predicate they represent via diagrams:asset. The available edge relationships between nodes depend on the type of the asset and SHACL property shapes that exist with matching sh:class constraints between them.

The RDF-based representation also means that Data Foundation features like importers, exporters, SPARQL query and ADS scripting can be applied on them. For example, diagrams can be generated programmatically from other data.

A consequence of the representation is also that edit permissions are required to modify the diagram, even to move or resize nodes.

Toolbar Features

  • Refresh diagram forces a manual refresh of the visualization from the underlying RDF representation. This is usually not necessary because the diagram should update itself after any edit, regardless of where they originated from.

  • Focus diagram globally selects the asset that represents the diagram itself. This can be used, for example, to edit the label of the diagram, or add descriptive comments.

  • Remove selected nodes from diagram removes the selected nodes from the diagram visualization only. The backing assets and their RDF data remain untouched in the asset collection. Any selected edges are also removed, and their backing triples are deleted. Only enabled when at least one node is selected.

  • Delete selected items and their backing assets permanently deletes the selected nodes and edges along with their backing assets and RDF triples from the asset collection. Only enabled when at least one node or edge is selected.

  • Export diagram can be used to save the diagram as an image.

  • Select a diagram shows the available diagrams, allowing users to switch between them. This includes diagrams that are stored in the current asset collection, but also any included asset collection. Diagrams that are stored in included collections are always read-only.

  • Create asset diagram can be used to create a new, empty diagram.

See Also

Further Reading on TQ Data Foundation