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Let's say I have a table full of structured data about a couple hundred objects. There exist conceptual groupings and hierarchies of these objects, but these relationships are not yet codified anywhere in the data.

What is a tool I could use to create these groupings and relationships? This does not have to be inter-operable with any existing software, but it must be able to import some of the structured information about these objects (name, id, description, a couple of attributes), and export structured data about the relationships that result from the work in this tool or application.

What I would like to do is organize these objects into a hierarchy, create dependency relationships, and also create arbitrary groupings of selected objects. I would like to do this using common keyboard-and-mouse paradigms such as multiple select and click-and-drag. Are there any tools that exist that could allow me to do these things with imported data using a graphical interface?

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  1. Groupings and hierarchies are graphs.

Try Gephi - it can import from database, edit graphs from scratch, export to various text formats, starting from CSV.

You will have to write import routines from text graph formats to database. Explore formats wisely with this in mind.

Also, you may need to do some temporary tables and UPDATE JOIN, since Gephi (and likely other graph software) only can have ID (from DB) and label (name + some crucial attributes) in graphs, graph nodes are not records.

This is the best option since you will be able to solve extra tasks on your data.

  1. Export data to XML. Use any XML editor (or software IDE - they often have XML support) capable of collapsing tree parts and drag'n'drop. Then re-import, using hierarchy.

I just tried freeware version of EditX on copy of my old backup disk structure dump - works.

  1. Export to files and folders (under thousand is not too much anyway), sort out by file manager and command line utilities, re-import with filesystem tree traversal script.

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