GIRAN: A dynamic graph interface to neighborhoods of related articles

Abstract

This contribution reports on the development of GIRAN (Graph Interface to Related Article Neighborhoods), a distributed web application featuring a Java applet user front-end for browsing recommended neighborhoods within the network of Wikipedia articles. The calculation of the neighborhood is based on a graph analysis considering articles as nodes and links as edges. The more the link structure of articles is similar to the article of current interest, the more they are considered related and hence recommended to the user. The similarity strength is depicted in the graph view by means of the width of the edges. A Java applet dynamically displays the neighborhood of related articles in a clickable graph centered around the document of interest to the user. The local view moves along the complete article network when the user shows a new preference by clicking on one of the presented nodes. The path of selected articles is stored, can be displayed within the graph, and is accessible by the user; the content of the article of current interest is displayed next to the graph view. The graph of recommended articles is presented in a radial tree layout based on a minimum spanning tree with animated graph transitions featuring interpolations by polar coordinates to avoid crisscrossings. Further graph search tools and filtering techniques like a selectable histogram of Wikipedia categories and a text search are available as well. This contribution portrays the graph analysis methods for thinning out the graph, the dynamic user interface, as well as the service-oriented architecture of the application back-end. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.