I had a chat with Christian Hirsch today. In his PhD he has developed the semantic visual wiki Thinkbase, which combines the two commercial tools thinkmap and the semantic wiki freebase. Thinkbase is a visual wiki in that it provides an interactive graph using the semantic data of freebase. Users can use the graph to browse the wiki and may also access other web-content, such as Wikipedia. However, being based on two commercial tools, his implementation is not open-source. But he might be able to re-implement his code and provide it as open-source.
Thinkbase: Mapping the World's Brain
Based on his implementation for Thinkbase, he has developed Thinkfree, which is an application of thinkbase for the IT department of the University of Auckland and ProcessMapper, which visualizes a business process, i.e. the enrolment at the university (both internal tool, access via Intranet only). The latest prototype is Thinkpedia, a visualization of Wikipedia. It will be online soon.
For his PhD thesis he is aiming at developing a meta-tool that may be used to create a visual extension to semantic wikis and other web-based application. Moreover, he will look at other possible application for his graph-based navigation, such as personalized adaptation (filtering or recommendation) and more.
Further Reading
- coming up: Publication at HICSS
- Short paper at ISWC
- Google TechTalk by Christian’s supervisor John Gordon Hosking
- another visual wiki: Viki: A visual wiki design
Thanks, interesting reference! Freebase can be called a wiki because of its agile, collaborative way of knowledge engineering, but on the other hand it’s quite different from other wikis (including SWiM) in that it rather deals with data than with documents. Actually, an important goal in the semantic wiki community is to combine both: by acquiring structured data from documents – by manual annotation, or automatically –, and then using them for services, such as the visualization shown here. It looks really cool, BTW.