Cytoscape WikiCurrently, all node and edge attributes in Cytoscape are global. When you create an attribute for a node, all networks that contain that node will show the attribute. This is clearly useful for a large category of attributes, such as node annotation. It would also be useful to have network specific attributes, in addition to the global attributes, maybe via an attribute namespace feature. For example, a node attribute that is computed for the specific network, like a node neighbor number attribute, is invalid if the structure of the network changes (example from Allan Kuchinsky). Another example is in an interaction prediction application where an interaction score attribute on an edge is computed upon network generation and is only valid for the combination of scoring parameters that were used to create the specific network.
Please feel free to add your design notes here.
For a complete implementation of this feature, we would need to: * Add a CyAttributes to each CyNetwork * Figure out how users will load global or network local attributes - this requires changes to the UI so the user can pick where the attributes should go. An open question is how to keep this simple - we may only want to allow advanced (i.e. plugin developer) access to this feature * Save of global and local attributes - this only required changes to the save format. * Browse and edit the attributes - the attribute browser UI could get messy unless we have a good design here.