David Huynh has recently joined the free­base team, after hav­ing worked on Exhibit and other SIMILE tools at MIT. His new project Par­al­lax is obvi­ously based on Exhibit (which fol­lowed mostly a faceted fil­ter­ing par­a­digm) but demon­strates a really inter­est­ing “side­wards brows­ing tech­nique” for nav­i­gat­ing related sets of dif­fer­ent types of entities.

As an exam­ple, you could start with a set of archi­tects, then fil­ter down to all mod­ern archi­tects, plot them on a map, a time­line etc. – quite nice already, but tra­di­tional facet brows­ing in prin­ci­ple. The catch how­ever, is that you can explore related col­lec­tions, like the <a href=“http://mqlx.com/~david/parallax/browse.html?state=!((d:(t:/architecture/architect),s:(f:!((p:!((f:!t,p:/architecture/architect/architectural_style)),s:!(/en/modern_architecture))),v:!((c:ThumbnailView,s:())),vi:0)),(d:(l:” onclick=“javascript:_gaq.push([’_trackEvent’,‘outbound-article’,‘mqlx.com/~david/parallax/browse.html?state=!((d:(t:/architecture/architect),s:(f:!((p:!((f:!t,p:/architecture/architect/architectural_style)),s:!(/en/modern_architecture))),v:!((c:ThumbnailView,s:())),vi:0)),(d:(l:’]);“Structures%20Designed’,p:!((f:!t,p:/architecture/architect/structures_designed))),s:(v:!((c:ThumbnailView,s:())),vi:0)))”>buildings they designed, their birth places etc. in the same manner. Very interesting principle and nicely executed, yet a bit hard to explain.

In this screencast, David explains it himself:
Freebase Parallax: A new way to browse and explore data from David Huynh on Vimeo.

As a side remark: academically, I think the Humboldt paper by Georgi Kobilarov first presented this principle (but they also refer to an earlier prototype of David's work). Unfortunately it was introduced under the name of pivot brows­ing, which is sort of reserved already for the quite related, but not iden­ti­cal prin­ci­ple intro­duced in dogear.

Any ideas for a good name? Side­wards brows­ing? Entity shift? Or just stick with parallax?

I just came across free­base again, and I have to say this thing looks really pros­per­ing. Free­base is sort of a meta­data / seman­tic web wiki, struc­tured around top­ics, types and domains. Essen­tially, it lets users add descrip­tions of enti­ties, such as movies, per­sons, build­ings and relate them to each other. The set of prop­er­ties used, of course, depends on the type of an entity. The project reuses a lot of Wikipedia or other free infor­ma­tion, but the inter­est­ing thing is the struc­tured approach and, for devel­op­ers, espe­cially the really pow­er­ful API with a very inter­est­ing query lan­guage approach based on JSON. Mashup time! :)

To get started, browse free­base, e.g. about, say, archi­tec­ture!