Nice work, this is a great way of seeing wikipedia + wikidata side by side (and having more intimate access to wikidata IDs).

It would be great if the hierarchy (breadcrumbs) + context of your session were preserved as you are navigating. Right now, it appears the value of this browser is that it augments a wikipedia-type page with wikidata semantic values within a side bar.

In contrast, http://math.mx (read: mathematics) is an example DAG (directed acyclic graph of hierarchical math topics, presented as a d3 zoomable treegraph) which preserves the context of your session (with breadcrumbs) as you traverse the directed graph of knowledge. A core value proposition of a browser (e.g. web browser) is that the provenance and history of a session is preserved; you can go back and revisit links (history), as well as gain perspective about how your searches were related (provenance). You session, itself, is essentially a graph (and this graph is critical for understanding your coverage/level of comprehension of a domain).

On WikiBrowser, one was viewing the WikiBrowser "Earth" page and you click the inner term "Planet", I would expect the interface to semantically zoom out of "Earth", into planet (because of the directionality of the relationship of the two terms: earth, planet). From this screen, I would expect to be able to go back (close "Planet" and return to "Earth") allowing my context to be returned/zoomed back to "Earth" (which had remained on the stack), or visit a new link/direction from within "Planet" and increase the depth of my stack.

Even with this (linear 1-step browsing w/ a provenance trail) solved, it's often extremely difficult to get a holistic view (topic depth > 1) of a topic (i.e. understand all the topics and sub-topics entailed) just by looking a single wikipedia page. Ideally, one could press a special hotkey (see "bring and go") and see an overlay (similar to your sidebar) with a graph (link depth of ~2 pages) which shows an entire graph of a page / topic's wikidata or wikipedia relations, which you can then use to navigate and more efficiently explore the knowledge space.

On the other hand, if (instead of a "browser") your main goal is augmenting (and creating a bi-directional mapping between) wikipedia articles and wikidata entries, have you considered something like a native Wikipedia Tool, e.g. Navigation Popups? (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tools/Navigation_popups -- Under the "Browsing" section, there is a checkable option for, "Navigation popups, article previews and editing functions popup when hovering over links)

I learned the feature existed when I asked on facebook (https://www.facebook.com/michael.karpeles/posts/10101912216804060)

It would be great if hovering over hyperlinks in Wikipedia resulted in a community approved 1-line distilled answer / summary tooltip

Just food for thought, to fuel your mission. Good luck!

best wishes,

- mek

On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 11:10 PM, <james@j1w.xyz> wrote:
I'd like to share an application that I'm developing for technology
demonstrations, entitled WikiBrowser. It is a web application that
leverages the structure of Wikidata to semantically navigate Wikipedia
articles. It is being developed in Java using technologies such as
Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, and Cloud Foundry. This web application is
live at http://WikiBrowser.io and the code is open source and located in
my GitHub repository.  There is a brief video that shows features of
WikiBrowser on my most recent blog post at http://JavaFXpert.com and I
hope that you'll take WikiBrowser for a spin!

Regards,
James Weaver
Developer Advocate
Pivotal Software
http://twitter.com/JavaFXpert

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