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We humans are capable of thinking in multiplicity:
the parents in law,
the presidential candidates,
the Surrealist paintings,
the Fortune 500 companies,
etc.
See all those plurals?
What's more? We humans can even think and reason about
relationships between many things—from
something serious like
the organizations who hired the assassins
who killed the presidents,
to something more mundane like
the email messages pertaining to the top-priority tasks
in the projects due in the next three weeks.
Feel the ease with which you can understand those
relationships?
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Yet, today on the Web, you can only go from one single
topic to one single other topic (one web page to another).
To feel this limitation, try to use Wikipedia to answer this
question: who are the sons in law of the Republican US presidents?
How much efforts did you spend jumping between web pages? And even
for such a simple question! This is because the question
requires you to handle sets of topics—the Republican presidents,
their daughters, the daughters' husbands—but the web browser
can only take you from one topic to one other topic—e.g., one
president to one of his daughters. This is an
inefficient way to browse for the task at hand.
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Parallax is a novel browsing interface that lets you go
from one set of topics to another set of topics,
e.g., from the Republican presidents to their daughters,
and then from the daughters to their husbands.
Many-to-many, rather than one-to-one.
Parallax works on top of Freebase,
an open, shared database of the world's information.
Research prototype designed + built by
David Huynh
Research Scientist
Metaweb Technologies, Inc.
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