Geography Tools

I’m thinking about trying to make a GUI based tool for creating EoC maps. I know Grandpatrout has created a tool that works from spreadsheets – I’m using it’s source as an example, although I intend to work in Java rather than C.

Is anyone else working on this? – there’s not a lot of point starting if someone else is halfway there.

How do people think this stuff should be displayed? I’m considering two views of a star system.
The first shows it as a tree, representing the parent-child relationships.
The second would show the spatial relationships, or at least a flattened version of them.

Any comments or suggestions welcome.
I have no idea how long this will take me, so don’t get your hopes up of having anything usable any time soon.