der Aussagegegenstand

A couple of month ago Marcel Hoyer recommended to me to have a short look at the Pivot project of Microsoft research. I was really amazed by the capabilities of the tool to browse to large collections of things in a faceted style. As only precondition of the approach you need a visual shape for every thing in the collection your user should search in. To get the idea of Pivot It’s really worth to watch the introduction video below.

I was really curious today when I read the announcement of Nexxor, the Stuttgart based start-up around the topicmapsforge, about their new Pivot visualisation for Topic Maps. It’s really great to see how the Nexxor team (which is Gerhard Weber, Ralf Eilbracht and Stefan Kesberg) married Pivot and Topic Maps. Here you can play around with the good old CIA factbook map. To compare the user experience with the generic approach you can browse a similar map in the Omnigator here.

Having advanced interfaces which make use of the structured, subject-centric data we have in Topic Maps is quite essential for the success of semantic technologies in enterprises. I’m looking forward to talk with the Nexxor team and to see other visualization approaches at the TMRA 2010.