words
I stumbled upon Visual Thesaurus today while thinking about words. It appeals to me. It’s a subscription service. I’m considering it. Take a look at their visualization applet. It’s really convenient to see a whole bunch of relations simultaneously, though the visualization at this point doesn’t really take advantage of positioning. All the nodes are equidistant from each other. I’m not exactly sure how you would implement this, but it seems natural that some words are more tightly linked as synonyms, so the relationship should appear stronger/closer/more prevalent than others.
Actually now that I really think about it, that’s a stupid idea. If I think that, it’s because I don’t have a real understanding of how multifaceted a word really is. However, I’m glad I left the above paragraph, rather than delete it, as it shows a thought process. I always find it more gratifying to follow along with an author, than to be at the receiving end of some pronouncement.
It could stand to group adjectives and nouns and verbs into easier to spot groups though.
Check out Protege and Ontoviz if you’re interested in mimicking visual thesaurus for some other dataset.
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