Thinkbase presented at a few Conferences

Earlier this year, we have presented Thinkbase and several other prototypes related to our concept of a "Visual Wiki" at a few international conferences.

In January we presented a paper titled "The Visual Wiki: A New Metaphor for Knowledge Access and Management" at the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 2009) on Big Island, Hawaii. (The paper received the best paper award in the knowledge management track.)

Shortly after wards Thinkbase was presented together with Thinkpedia at the Workshop on Visual Interfaces to the Social and the Semantic Web (VISSW 2009) on Sanibel Island, Florida. The paper is titled "Interactive Visualization Tools for Exploring the Semantic Graph of Large Knowledge Spaces".

Also, at the end of last year, "Thinkbase: A Visual Semantic Wiki" was presented at the Poster and Demo Session of the 7th International Semantic Web conference (ISWC 2008) in Karlsruhe, Germany. Here is the poster.

Some New Features

Thinkbase just got some new features. Besides some performance improvements and a few bug fixes, the new features include:

• A Thumbnail view of the graph


• A print function ( ) which prints the current graph


• The size of aggregation nodes (the gray circles) as well as the edge lengths are now dynamic, depending on the number of connections


• Numerical values, such as dates, are now also displayed in the graph


• The option to choose between a mapping to Freebase or Wikipedia ( )

tip#2 - tree of life

A cool feature of Thinkbase is the 'expand' and 'collapse' feature of nodes/icons (just right click on any node to access the context menu). It is actually possible to expand related nodes multiple times. That is, nodes which show up after expanding a node can also be expanded. This can result in some interesting visualizations.

For example, if you navigate to any living organism (lets say a dinosaur) and expand the relations labeled as 'lower classification' and 'higher classification' you will end up with a hierarchical chain of that organism ranging from its superclass down to the genus (see below).

(Note that the expansion of nodes is currently limited to 7 steps, though.)

Google Tech Talk about Thinkbase

John Hosking gave a Tech Talk at Google in Mountain View last week in which he was presenting our work regarding the "Visual Wiki". Thinkbase is one of the three tools presented in the talk.

new Feature: show and hide edge labels

Thinkbase has a small new feature: you are now able to show and hide all the labels of the edges in the graph. Simply right click into the background in the graph view and select "show labels" (or "hide labels"). For larger graphs this can get quite cluttered (which is the reason for only showing the labels when hovering the edges with the mouse), however, it might be useful, for example for taking screenshots.

Thinkbase on infosthetics and ReadWriteWeb

Following from a post on the information aesthetics blog, Josh Catone wrote an article on ReadWriteWeb about Thinkbase. Futhermore it was mentioned in the Freebase blog together with a few other cool Freebase applications.

tip#1 - pattern recognition in movies

One of the great things about Thinkbase is that it helps to better understand relationships and recognize patterns in the Freebase contents. Here is an example of how to use the 'Expand' function in order to create a graph with some interesting patterns:

1. go to the The Godfather movie topic


2. expand both of the sequels using the context menu (right click on the sequel icon > 'Expand')


3. expand the 'starring' relationship for all 3 movies (if it is not expanded yet)


4. collapse all the other nodes, such as 'language', 'produced_by', etc. (this reduces the clutter a little but)
   

You should then see a graph similar to the one below. The interesting thing is that you are now able to see certain patterns within these movies. In this case you can for example see: which actors starred in both, part I and part II; which actors starred in all 3 parts; etc. This is highlighted in blue in the images below.

If you look closely, you can also see more details. There is for example one character which occurs in part I and part II, but was played by two different actors. Can you spot him?