BEST SITE OF 1998
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"An engaging experience in language and interface, the Plumb Design Visual Thesaurus is an artistic exploration that is also a learning tool. Through its dynamic interface, the Plumb Design Visual Thesaurus alters our relationship with language, creating poetry through user action, dynamic typography, and design. The experience is rewarding from both a linguistic and an aesthetic perspective. The Visual Thesaurus was created using Plumb Design's Thinkmap™ software.
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Thinkmap allows designers to rapidly develop innovative interfaces to databases. By allowing users to visualize the relationships in complex data, Thinkmap bridges the gap between qualitative and quantitative analysis. Written in Java, the Thinkmap engine is able to interface with data using standard SQL queries. Thinkmap creates dynamic Java Maplets™ that illustrate the connections in complex data sets with a stunning visual display that is unlike anything else currently available. Thinkmap allows publishers and owners of data to create interactive displays that make this information enticing and easy-to-navigate. This increases the ability of viewers to browse through complex information.
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The Visual Thesaurus accesses data from the WordNet database, a publicly available resource developed by the Cognitive Science Laboratory at Princeton University. This database, first created in 1985 as a dictionary based on psycholinguistic theories, contains over 50,000 words and 40,000 phrases collected into more than 70,000 sense meanings."
