Here's my first whack at a Visual Wordnet. It's the first application that uses my Force Directed Graph engine for Javascript.

Use Visual Wordnet

Yes ... Javascript. This is an exercise to see if Javascript-driven Force Directed Graphs might be useable in web application user interfaces for search, document navigation, etc. The display uses only the DOM (Document Object Model) with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for absolute positioning and ... being pretty.

Sources and Background

Wordnet is a project at Princeton University's Cognitive Science Laboratory that provides a map of the English language. Visual Wordnet currently presents only a narrow view of Wordnet's resources.

The idea of using Force Directed and Hyperbolic graphs to display and navigate Wordnet is nothing new. ThinkMap's Visual Thesaurus is just awesome and it does a much better job scaling to support large graphs. So why write this implementation? ThinkMap's solution is implemented in Java and available as an applet. It's just not appropriate for some applications. Also ... it ain't free.

Known Issues (echoed from my initial post on Force Directed Graphs)

• Performance: As currently implemented, the graphing engine consumes a lot of processing power, even after the graph has settled. An entropy-based throttle would help.
• Scaling: The layout algorithm has a complexity of On2 :(. It just doesn't scale very well.
• Graphs for words with a lot of synonyms, like "work" and "go", contain a lot of nodes. With the scaling problems, this drives performance to a near-stall.

Posted by kyle scholz at 04:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)