The Tomigaia Blog: Visual Thesaurus

May 01, 2003

Visual Thesaurus

I have been showing this site to a lot of people,

and everybody seems to find it interesting. It is a Visual Thesaurus and it was made by a local, New York, company called Plumb Design. They used a product of their's called a "ThinkMap" to make it. This interface widget can be used to represent many kinds of data, not just semantic networks.

Also, my friend Adam Lindemann pointed me to a interesting search engine called Kartoo. It seems to make visual maps of concepts on the web. I found it quite amazing.

I use it to get my creative juices flowing, and to start thinking laterally.

What do you think about this interface? Please add your about this interface to my blog! (use the comment feature below.)

Posted by cyrus at May 1, 2003 08:10 PM | T r a c k B a c k

Comments

I enjoy playing around with this style interface. I have not used one on this scale. "PersonalBrain" allows you to build your own associations between snippets you input yourself, but it is limited in size and governed by the starting associations which you have input.

Whenever I use mindmapping and other sorts of visual software I marvel at the mental qualities others have that I cannot fathom for reasons of brain structure, gender, age, whatever. Probably age - I would probably rave if every factoid in the Springsteen discography/iconography were to be so structured.

Posted by: Ben Miller on May 6, 2003 02:57 AM

Ben: Where can I get my hands on this "PersonalBrain"? I think I need one! :=)

Posted by: Cyrus Shaoul on May 6, 2003 10:43 AM

www.thebrain.com for free trial download

there is a PersonalBrain discussion group within yahoogroups

there is an enterprise edition; maybe that's the trick: have three or more people inputting data and relationships; then you could get some serendipity

Posted by: Ben Miller on May 6, 2003 07:08 PM

Thanks, Ben. I will try it out!

Posted by: Cyrus Shaoul on May 7, 2003 09:39 AM

ok, i'm coming from the left field here...
i'd followed this site for a long time, love it...hadn't visited it in a while...

probably has nothing to do with the conceptual or the programming behind visual thesaurus but another site i love that reminds me of this one...
http://sodaplay.com/constructor/index.htm

Posted by: s. on May 20, 2003 10:25 AM

Thanks for the link! I will check it out.

Posted by: Cyrus Shaoul on May 20, 2003 11:06 AM

There was another company in San Francisco doing this same sort of interface back in the late 90's. I forget the name, but I interviewed with them (didn't get the position though). We really need an open source version of this so we can start bringing this sort of knowledge visualization to the masses.

Posted by: Dav on May 21, 2003 12:24 PM

I agree... Was the company called Vivid?

Posted by: Cyrus Shaoul on May 21, 2003 01:02 PM