DAHN Space Navigator — Concept¶

What It Is¶

The Space Navigator is a DAHN Dancer for exploring, inspecting, and eventually editing a MAP Space through its holons and their effective affordances. It composes HolonSpace-specific experience roles, including a generic Rooted Navigation Visualizer rooted at that HolonSpace. Canvas hosts the resulting experience without making either Space Navigator or Rooted Navigation a Canvas kind.

It is not a succession of domain-specific screens. It is a generic, descriptor-driven experience that can present previously unknown holon types through selected Node, Collection, PropertyMap, Value, and Action Visualizers.

The Navigator is not a Canvas and is not DAHN itself. A Canvas may host the Space Navigator alongside other Dancers, switch among them, or compose them.

Why This Model Exists¶

Ordinary page navigation tends to replace context as a person follows a path. The initial Path Inspector realization treats exploration as spatial accumulation:

a person can see what they are inspecting;
the route by which they reached it remains available;
collections retain the sibling context from which a member was selected; and
prior context can become compact without becoming semantically lost.

This makes MAP's graph-like, descriptor-defined structure legible without requiring a custom application screen for every holon type.

Entering DAHN¶

Before the initial Space Navigator is exposed, DAHN may offer a short DAHN Launch Experience: an entry ritual rather than a splash screen. Its movement from cosmos to stellar light, living Earth, living place, and finally I-Space locates the person as a participating local center within progressively larger wholes:

cosmogenesis → planetary emergence → life → place → participation

The initial narrative is NGC 346 → stellar-light transition → Earth → Okavango Delta → I-Space / Space Navigator. It must suggest continuity across those scales, not simulate literal travel or claim that a star in NGC 346 is the Sun. The intended meaning of the arrival is: here, within all of this, is the local center from which you participate—not an isolated ego or avatar.

This first Navigator is deliberately a proto-experience: a practical opening of MAP's visual layer, not its definitive visual expression. Richer visualizations and alternative experience designs remain possible through the Visualizer Commons. A future descent to a person's actual bioregion or locality is a design north star, not an MVP commitment.

The launch experience is constrained by the DAHN architecture but is not a MAP visualizer or a Visualizer Commons contribution. Its observable behavior, accessibility, provenance, and application-shell boundary are defined in the Launch Experience specification; its delivery slice is defined in the implementation plan.

Descriptor-Driven Experience¶

The essential principle is:

Definitions determine structure; runtime data populates it.

Descriptors determine which relationships are defined and their structural shape. A singular relationship remains singular when empty; a plural relationship remains plural with one target. Runtime discovery determines which of these relationships currently offer somewhere to navigate. Normal browsing progressively reveals populated relationships; editing and schema inspection can also expose empty ones.

Navigation establishes topology before content: first determine that a destination exists, then make room for it, communicate what is opening there, and populate that same space. This preserves the visible connection between action, destination, and result.

The same posture applies to Dance result shapes. The Navigator can determine the applicable class of presentation from a Dance's declared response contract before invoking it.

This enables generic presentation rather than a growing family of type-specific screens.

Two Complementary Ways to Explore¶

Path Inspector gives distinct spatial meaning to two kinds of exploration:

Follow one thing. A direct, singular continuation extends horizontally.
Choose among many things. A plural affordance first exposes a collection, from which a selected member extends vertically.

The distinction is semantic, not merely visual. Direct continuation preserves a lineage of one-to-one choices; a collection preserves the set and sibling context through which a member was reached.

The detailed rules for topology, projection, compression, overflow, and recovery are normative in the Path Inspector Interaction Grammar.

Reusable Visual Roles¶

Space Navigator directly composes these roles:

a space role for the HolonSpace Holon itself, realized through an appropriate Node Visualizer;
an afforded-Dancers role for Dancers afforded by that HolonSpace;
a Rooted Navigation Visualizer for the evolving navigation structure anchored at that HolonSpace; and
experience-level actions.

The selected Visualizers then compose their own children, including:

a Node Visualizer for one holon and its affordances;
a Collection Visualizer for a homogeneous plural result;
PropertyMap and Value Visualizers for property-set and value presentation; and
Action Visualizers for available actions.

A table is an initial Collection Visualizer, not the permanent definition of a collection. Likewise, generic candidates preserve usability through ordinary DAHN applicability and slot-compatible selection.

Holons OwnedBy the HolonSpace form an initial heterogeneous ownership structure. It gives the experience meaningful current context, but is distinct from the interaction-derived navigation topology that Rooted Navigation progressively unfolds through traversal.

A future AgentSpace may extend HolonSpace with additional agent, social, or governance affordances. That could add roles to Space Navigator without specializing the generic Rooted Navigation Visualizer.

Context, Provenance, and Scale¶

Each inspected holon appears as a visualizer occurrence with its own provenance. The same semantic holon may appear in more than one occurrence when reached by different paths.

As exploration grows, the Rooted Navigation Visualizer need not keep every occurrence fully expanded. It preserves recoverable context while allocating its Canvas-provided real-estate budget toward the current area of work. This is why the experience remains a navigable space rather than an ever-growing page or a history that must be discarded.

Read and Edit Are One Experience¶

The Navigator is intended to inspect and manipulate MAP state through the same descriptor-driven visual structure. Editing is a mode of an existing occurrence, not a second form-oriented application. MAP retains ownership of semantic and staged state while Space Navigator and its selected Visualizers each retain the experience state they own within their received allocation.

The Architecture and Design Specification define those responsibilities and concrete behavior respectively.

Relationship to the Rest of the Specification¶

This document explains the mental model. It does not define architectural ownership, spatial transformation invariants, concrete UI behavior, or delivery sequence.