In the last two years I have come across several long articles by John Sowa. What I’ve read of them has been of very high quality, but towards the edge of my radar. Thus they are still in my in-pile. Today I came across a short, recent article that is a pure gold antidote to some of the extremely drawn out and ongoing discussions in the semantic web communities: Fads and Fallacies about logic.
On Friday the excellent information aesthetics feed pointed me to wikimindmap.org, an Adobe Flash visualisation of a wikipedia topic as a mind map. The image above shows the wikimindmap visualization for Sweeney Todd – the main character in the musical/opera of the same name by Steven Sondheim (chosen for it’s compact size, and because I’ve just been to see it performed at the Royal Festival Hall). This is very nice. It combines the “at a glance” loveliness of mind mapping with the collective wisdom of wikipedia. It may provide a way for humans (as opposed to machines – that is another story) to scan topics more quickly than scan-reading them.