Wikinity -------- Wikinity is an experimental visual tool for exploring Wikipedia articles as connected nodes on a graphical map. The initial solution allows to search Wikipedia for any article and visualizes the article as a node on a graph, with links to other articles. Nodes have text from the first section of the Wikipedia article, and a thumbnail of the first image. Links can be clicked to open a new connected node on the graph, nodes can be closed and reopened. The choice of automatically opened connections is relatively arbitrary at the moment and depends heavily on the article content. It's possible to share wikinity links that will autoload a specific search: http://wikinity.cc/#term=Wikipedia or with detailed parameters: http://wikinity.cc/#limit=1&depth=5&images=1&autohide=0&autoclear=1&clickstream=1&term=Wikipedia Browsers ======== Wikinity has not been developed to be browser independent, the idea was to see what can be done at all. Currently supports: * Firefox 3.6 * Chrome 10 * Safari 5 Has glitches in Opera and does not work in IE at all. Technical Information --------------------- All content is coming from wikipedia via JSON (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php). Uses Springy (https://github.com/dhotson/springy) for the graph layout and jQuery (http://jquery.com/). Currently, connections for the automatic node expansion are obtained first from the article's "See also" section, then from the links in its first section, and if still nothing found, from the article categories. The page with included libraries is totally stand-alone and can used from any local directory as well. Further Improvements -------------------- There is a mountain of further improvement to do, to make this into a truly usable application, as everything at the moment is very ad hoc. A much better selection of links for autoexpand, an improved interface, more functionality, more content parsing from wikipedia (seeing more links, more sections, highlighted external links etc). For a list of concrete improvement ideas, please see GitHub. At some point, developing zooming in and out on the entire article graph would give awesome possibilities for exploring Wikipedia. Especially with a 3D model. In addition, the link selection algorithm might benefit from using text mining, and network+clickstream analysis. A tentative idea for a possible final aim: creating a solution that allows for easy visual navigation of any web content. Data ---- Anonymous clickstream is collected from the website to understand the ways the application gets used, and the parts to concentrate on improving. Clickstream can be disabled from UI settings. Acknowledgements ---------------- * Special kudos go to Silver, Allan, Ando, and Taavi for their ideas on navigating the invisible. * Katy Börner's book "Atlas of Science" triggered a lot of ideas, some of which are implemented in Wikinity. Copyright (C) 2011 by Erki Suurjaak <erki@lap.ee> Andre Karpistsenko <andre@lap.ee> Distributed with AGPLv3 license.