I’ve been thinking about what it would look like if you could auto-enable certain names in a text – as in the Sunlight Foundation’s PopUp Politicians – with information continually being compiled somewhere else.
I made this demo out of the examples on the mjt website plus some jQuery to slide the influence data from Freebase in and out of a text. It’s kind of relating back to the original intention of hypertext (as the digital extension of annotation and footnoting) except that you no longer have to interrupt the visual context of the original page.
This is not automating the searching for names and enabling, just building tables for names that I selected. You don’t have to login to Freebase to see the demo because I’ve hardcoded the results into the HTML – running real queries is actually easier.
July 17, 2007 at 2:14 pm
Dear Mike Love,
Please excuse this out-of-topic comment, but i can’t find your email address.My name is Alberto Armandi, i’m a student of IT engineering at the university of Pavia, Italy. Recently i came up with the idea
of a “visual wikipedia browser”, i registered the domain
visupedia.org but until now had not succeded in developing a decent custom browser myself. I found your demo at http://mike-love.net/touchgraph/ and i think is exactely what i’m looking for,wouldn’t be possible to adapt this to a live wikipedia visual browser ? i would love your collaboration in this project. Let me know, thanks for your time.
Alberto
July 17, 2007 at 2:44 pm
There are a few people who have built Wikipedia browsers already that you might want to check out:
Pathway:
http://pathway.screenager.be/
and 34all, which is built on the Prefuse library:
http://goosebumps4all.ifastnet.com/34all/index.html
http://prefuse.org
But I’m expecting Freebase to be the data source for interesting visualizations, which will do the scraping for you and give you access to everything through JSON queries.
August 8, 2007 at 10:32 am
Hi Mike,
Thanks for pointing my attenction to those Wikipedia browsers, finally with the precious help of Martin Dudek, the author of 34all, i came out with a working version of a live wikipedia visual / graphical browser. It can be tried at http://www.visupedia.org let me know what you think about it. I also checked out freebase and i think it’s a good metabase for further visualization, there’s already a simple app developed for this scope.
Thanks for your support
Alberto Armandi