Monday, April 21, 2008
CCVisu: A Tool for Visual Graph Clustering and General Force-Directed Graph Layout
Found an excellent, free, well-documented, open-source tool that does exactly what I needed – force-directed graph layout and it generates x, y, z coordinates. I loaded it into my Eclipse IDE and it ran immediately without a single error. Wow! first time that’s ever happened. Congratulations to the developers of CCVisu. Command line parameters are described clearly in the online documentation and so far everything works as described. It is adaptable and appears to be easily modifiable. Doesn’t seem real somehow. What a gem!

Thursday, November 18, 2004
Keyhole
Keyhole 2 LT is software for displaying aerial photographs in an innovative way, not unlike Celestia (See May 27, 2002).  You can see things as small as people in certain places (like Las Vegas).  Go to Paris and look at the Eiffel Tower.  To me this is an exciting development in computing and informatics.

Monday, October 18, 2004
Google Desktop
Use Google technology to search your own computer.  

Monday, April 12, 2004
Scirus
Scirus is a search engine for science.  It focuses on web pages containing scientific information. 

Sunday, March 21, 2004
Google local
Search for businesses and services by location. 

Wednesday, March 17, 2004
Google define 
To see how a word is defined on the Web, go to Google and then type define:term.  For example, you could type "define:structuralism".

Tuesday, April 8, 2003
Accelerating intelligence 
Recent technological advances are showcased at kurzweilai.net.  The site also features thought-provoking articles by "big thinkers", like The Law of Accelerating Returns, by Ray Kurzweil.

Thursday, March 13, 2003
Keyword in context (KWIC) concordances
Supply a word or phrase, and the Cobuild Concordance and Collocations Sampler will return many short snippets of prose in which the word or phrase has appeared.  Each search result is aligned on the page so that your search term appears in the center.

Tuesday, February 25, 2003
Software that lets your computer talk 
Why not listen to an article while you fold your laundry? The FREE version of ReadPlease 2003 does an impressive job at reading text, and can be a real time-saver.  Currently only available for the PC.

Monday, February 24, 2003
The free online encyclopedia
On Wikipedia, anyone can update any page -- even you! Three cheers for those who monitor the "recent changes" log and keep the site in good repair.

Thursday, October 31, 2002
Get Google search results in the form of short sentences.
Googlism is fascinating, and it could be used as a component of Idea 3, in the left column, below.  Google is developing its own version of a similar search engine, Google Glossary.

Wednesday, October 30, 2002
What is the nature of the relationship between two concepts?
Find out by using The Lexical FreeNet.

Tuesday, October 29, 2002
Automatically create sets of items from a list of examples.
Try out Google Sets, under development at Google Labs.

Tuesday, June 18, 2002
A new kind of search engine!    Infomap tells you how your search term co-occurs with other words.  Choose between the British National Corpus, Medical Abstracts, Medline Abstracts, the New York Times, AP-newswire, and the Wall Street Journal.  Try out the "clustered results" option with 100 results and 10 clusters.

Thursday, May 30, 2002
This could be the visual search engine you've been waiting for.  Kartoo displays your search results as interconnected circles of various sizes within a larger circle.

Monday, May 27, 2002
Travel through the universe on your computer.  A free, open-source software program, Celestia allows you to travel to the Moon, the Sun, or to the next galaxy.  You can speed up or slow down logarithmically, so it doesn't take forever to get where you're going.  New features are continually added.  I would like to find a similar program for exploring Earth.  (See my notes from 1-5-02).

Thursday, April 25, 2002
What web content are people really excited about right now?  Daypop Top 40 Links reflects the most popular links in weblogs today.

Sunday, April 21, 2002
Visual representation of text.  TextArc is an "index, concordance, and summary" all in one.  The technique empowers the viewer's eye to help discern meaning.

Tuesday, April 16, 2002
Extraction of knowledge from unstructured text.  This briefing "overviews the state of the art in the areas of information retrieval, summarization, information extraction, text clustering and question answering."

Sunday, April 7, 2002
Text mining.  Untangling text data mining is an excellent overview of the exciting possibilities of text mining.  This vision is also described in this article from Mappa Mundi magazine.  Leximancer's gallery features examples of text mining and concept mapping.

Sunday, March 24, 2002
Global ideas bank.  The Global Ideas Bank is a "global suggestion box for socially innovative non-technological ideas and projects."  Ideas include lending $80,000 to every citizen at age 21 and an audience discussion period immediately after films.  Source: Utne Reader, April 2002.

Saturday, March 23, 2002
An interface for very large-scale conversations.   Conversation map is a newsgroup browser to help people reflect on large-scale Internet-based conversations.

Tuesday, March 19, 2002
A digital library for scientific literature.  The NECI Scientific Literature Digital Library contains many impressive features, including autonomous citation indexing and identification of related documents.

Sunday, March 17, 2002
A useful application of natural language processing.  The Columbia Newsblaster is an automatic system for event tracking and summarization.

Friday, March 15, 2002
A new way to browse the Web.  Fueled by the Netscape Open Directory Project, WebBrain allows you to browse the web by concept.  The Google Web Directory also adds value to the information in the Open Directory Project.

Thursday, March 14, 2002
Natural language question answering systems.  Have you ever wondered how far it is from Bora Bora to Bemidji?  The START Natural Language Question Answering System can answer free-text questions in certain domains of knowledge.  Its sources are reliable, and it is potentially a great tool for reference librarians.  Some of the clever technology behind START is described in an article by Boris Katz, Jimmy Lin and Sue Felshin.

Where START is rigid and structured, AnswerBus is freewheeling.  It takes advantage of the massive amount of text on the Internet.  Are its answers right or wrong?  You be the judge. 

Wednesday, March 13, 2002
Information visualization at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.  The PNNL has developed innovative methods to visualize unstructured textual information.  I first became interested in the automated analysis of text after attending a presentation by this group.

Tuesday, March 12, 2002
The Visual Thesaurus.  Lose yourself in a world of words.  This may take some time to download, but it's well worth the wait. 

Monday, March 11, 2002
Web self-organization.  According to this NEC study, "a remarkable degree of order emerges from the independent linking actions of individuals."  Web communities can be identified by link structure alone.  This finding may result in better search engines and could "generally improve our understanding of the world."  This was also reported in Nature.

Sunday, March 10, 2002
I am starting this weblog today.  I hope this site will improve my interaction with others who have similar interests.

I wonder if it would be useful to create a large database of human knowledge, or some subset of knowledge.  In this database, concepts could be defined automatically based on their co-occurrence with other concepts.