Yahoo! answers (sort of)
| Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 | --Sean |
(Sorry for the missed day. Being on business travel messes up my Y! Cool Thing schedule.)
It occasionally feels as though the internet, somewhere, somehow, contains all the answers to any question we can think up, if we just know how to ask. Okay, sometimes the quality is substandard and I bet a bunch of those answers are just for point-gaming purposes anyway, but the thought is there.
Matt Biddulph had one such interesting question and took a very interesting approach in getting it answered. He was tasked with taking a flat list of, say, influential characters from British and American politics in the latter half of the 20th century and generating a directed graph showing the various relations between them. Wikipedia was the obvious place to collect information about each person, and the Yahoo! term extraction service provided a way to filter out key entities from each entry and relate them back to the original list, providing a beautiful chart like this. I'm not exactly a history buff, but it seems like a compelling summary to me.
So, if you're ever looking for an answer from the great online oracle (not this one), take solace in the fact that there are a bunch of great services out there to help you phrase the question.