It's Thanksgiving Day today so it's about time for me to thank you for reading this column. It's also time to offer you a gift.
With the help of Joe Sullivan, we are going to take a trip to the Visual Thesaurus website.
It’s kind of like a regular thesaurus -- but much cooler. Type a word, any word, into the Visual Thesaurus and a little fountain of its related words whirls before you: synonyms, antonyms, origins, and a host of other relations. In 3-D, the site visually illustrates the root word’s relationship to its components with a set of revolving lines leading to seemingly endless links the user can click on.
Here is a small image of what the Visual Thesaurus knows about "Thanksgiving."
A better and larger version is available here.
Joe Sullivan discussed with Marc Tinkler, CTO and principal of New York City-based Plumb Design, the company behind this application.
Q: Where did you get the idea for the site?
A: We were looking for a publicly available database with appeal to a broad audience in order to demonstrate our Thinkmap technology. We wanted to build a site that could show the interrelationships between words and meanings typically obscured by alphabetical representations and traditional interfaces (lists, tables, etc.). When we learned about WordNet, a lexical reference system developed by the Cognitive Science Laboratory at Princeton University, we realized that we had found a data set full of rich content and interesting relationships.
Please remember to bookmark this site. This will not modify your lives, but it might change your relationship with words.
Sources: Plumb Design's Visual Thesaurus; Joe Sullivan, Darwin Magazine, November 4, 2002
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