ZigZag (software)

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Information mapping
Topics and fields
Business decision mapping Data visualization Graphic communication Infographics Information design Knowledge visualization Mental model Morphological analysis Ontology (information science) Schema (psychology) Visual analytics Visual language
Node–link approaches
Argument map Cladistics Cognitive map Concept lattice Concept map Conceptual graph Decision tree Dendrogram Graph drawing Hyperbolic tree Hypertext Issue map Issue tree Layered graph drawing Mind map Object-role modeling Organizational chart Pathfinder network Radial tree Semantic network Sociogram Timeline Topic map Tree structure ZigZag
See also
Design rationale Diagrammatic reasoning Entity–relationship model Geovisualization List of concept- and mind-mapping software Olog Ontology (philosophy) Problem structuring methods Semantic Web Treemapping Wicked problem
v t e

ZigZag is a data model, invented by Ted Nelson, that deconstructs the spreadsheet to allow irregular relations, at the same time generalizing the idea to multiple dimensions.

The design is centered on an information structure called a zzstructure and its interactive visualizations. Instead of conventional linear text or tree structures, zzstructure is a multidimensional extension of a spreadsheet whose cells can contain various kinds of data.

Whereas conventional spreadsheet software requires a rectangle of equal-length rows, the ZigZag model holds arbitrary structures of cells—as long as they are orthogonally connected (left edge to right edge, top edge to bottom, and so on in as many dimensions as desired).

At any moment, the display shows any two dimensions in table form, but only existing cells are shown—what would be empty space on a spreadsheet simply does not exist. Users can pivot the display about any cell to efficiently "rotate" any unseen dimension in place of either visible one, allowing them to browse high dimensional grids in a zigzag manner.