A JavaScript Visual Wordnet

JavaScriptSearch
Wednesday, June 7, 2006; 05:42 AM

In case you didn't know, Wordnet is a Princeton-conceived "online lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current psycholinguistic theories of human lexical memory."  The original concept is coded into a desktop application that can be downloaded at wordnet.princeton.edu; there is a Java implementation at visualthesaurus.com; now a JavaScript take at the idea is available at kylescholz.com/projects/wordnet.

Kyle Sholz, author of the JavaScript Wordnet, qualifies his creation as a  "an exercise to see if Javascript-driven Force Directed Graphs might be useable in web application user interfaces for search, document navigation, etc. The display uses only the DOM (Document Object Model) with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for absolute positioning and ... being pretty."

The wordnet represents nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs organized into synonym sets, each representing one underlying lexical concept. Different relations link the synonym sets.  The structure is presented as a graphic (see below).

The JavaScript Wordnet.