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 <https://youtu.be/hm2oFBqVM9o?t=1m18s>") 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(a)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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