Project idea - Visual Thesauras like application

[tuxdna]

Complexity: Tough

Project Idea description:

The idea is to have a mind map of words ( thesaurus ).

There is a website called Visual Thesaurus which provides commercial
application which one can use to visualize the link among words.

For example:
notation used below -> = relates to

friend -> pal
firend -> neighbour

Visual Thesaurus will display a liked graph of colored nodes, where
each node is a word, with edges of various lengths. It provides
an interactive interface to view word's meanings etc.



What to use the accomplish the task?

There is a project called WordNet where we can a database of English
words and their relationship with other words.
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/

WordNet will serve as database to be explored.

Next comes the visualization part. One can use any visualization
technology.
The selection of technology will make the project a bit easier or
tougher.

Ones that I know of are, in the order of complexity:
* OpenGL - http://www.opengl.org/
* Coin3D ( based on OpenGL ) - http://doc.coin3d.org/SoQt/
* HTML5 Canvas - http://diveintohtml5.org/canvas.html#divingin

There would be definitely more of these. I have listed only those
which I am
aware of.


How to do it?

Its upto you on how to make the design and select technology.


Comments and suggestions are welcome.

/tuxdna