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.