Rediscover Wikipedia: Enter PathWay, A Visual and Relational Browser

I’ve been using a great application for the last few months and I figured I would share my thoughts. Like most people, I use Wikipedia as a major source for research. One of the challenges I’ve always had though is getting caught up in “information serendipity”. I tend to start reading one thing, and eventually discover many new interesting links, and ultimately forget what I was originally looking at.

The answer to my information attention defecit problem has been Pathway. Pathway is a Mac OS X application that is basically a visual/relational Wikipedia browser. The UI has 4 main components:

Concepts (left) – Each Wikipedia entry you’ve clicked on will be displayed on the left-hand side of the browser. You can easily navigate forwards and backwards between different entries.

Concept/Mind Map (top center) – Clicking on a certain entry will show all related concepts and entries related to the Wikipedia article. If you decide to click on a new concept, a new arc showing the relationship will be created.

Article (bottom center) – The Wikipedia article content is displayed here. This is what you typically see in a regular web browser.

Outline (right) – The article outline is displayed so you can easily navigate sections of the article.
If you have a Mac, I’d really recommend giving this application a try.

2 Responses

Eric Blue's Blog

June 11, 2007 at 12:06 am

WikiMindMap
Chuck Frey recently posted about an interesting application called WikiMindMap that represents Wikipedia entries in a mindmap format. WikiMindMap is a tool to browse easily and efficiently in Wiki content, inspired by the mindmap technique. Wiki pages …

Ontological Visualization – Holoplex Media

March 22, 2012 at 7:24 pm

[…] that end I’ve been looking for a visual representation of Wikipedia. I came across mention of PathWay which is a visual relational browser for Wikipedia (screenshot below). Unfortunately, it is a […]

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