rgnbgn.de

Tonight, I am happy to announce the soon-to-come release of a project I've spend a fair amount of time working on:

Chart-o-matic is a easy-to-use solution for embedding simple charts in web documents. Initially developed as a part of my final year project at university, it will soon be released to the public under BSD-Licence.

What makes Chart-o-matic significantly different from all the other client-side charting libraries is its approach to the visualized information: It takes statistical data that was stored in html tables and turns it into a bar-, line-, or pie-charts. In a way, it does for charts what sIFR does for typography: It preserves the semantics of textual information while still providing a rich graphic experience to the users of modern browsers.

Although it's not completely finished yet, I've put some more Information and a small demonstration of the system together. Have a look at it here: Chart-o-matic project website »

The brand new web-app Powerset is a semantic search engine that aggregates information from Wikipedia as well as other sources. As the search engine understands natural English language to a certain extend, it is able to reply to questions – e.g. if you ask Powerset "Who invented the web?", it will answer "The Web was invented by English scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1989." and point you to a bunch of relevant articles.

On first sight, Powerset might seem like a combination of Wikipedia and the concept of ELIZA ("what is ELIZA?") or todays chatterbots, but it is much more than that. It offers an ass-kicking interface for browsing and searching Wikipedia. The search engine even extends Wikipedia's functionality by generating outlines and linking to further relevant information. It resembles ideas from Berners-Lee's concept of the Semantic Web and is in some ways similar to the knowledge database Freebase (actually, Powerset also aggregates data from Freebase).

Apart from all that, Powerset is a great example of slick interface design and information architecture. Try it yourself: Ready. Powerset. Go.