Knowledge Graphs

Google has been working on using knowledge graphs of information with their search to give a better search experience for their users. If you haven't previously seen the video they released a while ago I have attached.

After seeing this video and after looking through a lot of the other companies which are trying to create this types of graphs (SeatGeek has an awesome one in progress!) I've been also trying to develop a small scale application that will allow me to add information and it would automatically be inserted in the right position and in the right place.

The premise of my application is to connect people with similar interests and ideas together. At NYU we've formed a small project called Bridge (not released to public yet) and we're trying to connect students together through interests and ideas and I've been working on a side project to test once we have some sample data of students. I'm wanting to take interests and ideas of different individuals and put it into a database and represent each person as a node that will connect to different people. Then there will be different lines that will represent different connections between people, such as: red -> friendship, blue -> following, green: similar interests, and black -> similar ideas. This is a small project but this will not just allow to visually see the connections between ideas and interests of students but also be a small tool to find the person who shares the most interests/ideas and link them together.  

Moreover, recently I've read a study on Twitter that explains how Twitter needs to get the user to follow 10 people for them to return back to the site, Facebook needs to get the user to friend at least 7 people, and Dropbox needs their users to create one folder. This is quite interesting, and the data would speed up the process and help them better advertise in their correct markets. In the future I'd like to see tools using these data analysis that will allow people to easily measure this data for their sites.

Lastly, if you want to experiment on trying to make visualizations of these sorts - There is an amazing Javascript library on GitHub.

Prototype 1

The first prototype I created was based upon my previous Knowledge Map concept. You put it in what you learn, where you learnt it and the topic and it gets the article from the Source and stores it with what you've learnt.

I built it using just PHP, MYSQL and the d3 Javascript library. I was able to create a visualization of the knowledge you added and tried to connect the different subjects together.

It was a very simple first prototype, and in the next prototype I'm going to be adding gamification of knowledge, a better UI & login for every user. Below was a screenshot of what each individual knowledge looked like.

The second prototype

My second prototype is currently in production. The theme is just a initial design of what I think it should look like - and I haven't designed it myself yet. But this time I was able to use Ruby on Rails to start creating this project and learning Rails. I am going to be open sourcing this code as soon as I am done. Below is a screenshot of the application. Currently the gamification module has been added, the Login Module. Next steps are to add a social module to it, a Feed Module, and a few gems that I will be creating.