The German news site fudder.de published an interesting article about our graphical knowledge engine eyePlorer.com (German only).

By the way, we’ll launch a new version of eyePlorer.com in a few days. Stay tuned …

While we’re still busy working on a new set of features for eyePlorer.com, a new version of the application was released today. It mainly contains several bug fixes, most of which had been reported by our users – thanks a lot for your help! And keep sending in those feature requests and also bug reports, should you happen to find any.

Our company vionto GmbH is participating in the Summer of Innovation competition which is hosted by Semantic Seed.

If you like our graphical knowledge engine eyePlorer.com, your help is needed: please head over to vator.tv and vote for vionto, thanks!

Update: the deadline for the Summer of Innovation competition, August 31, is fast approaching. If you like eyePlorer.com and haven’t voted vor vionto GmbH and eyePlorer.com yet, please register an account with vator.tv and vote for vionto, your help is much appreciated! Thanks!

Die visuelle Wissensmaschine eyePlorer.com wird mit dem SuMa Award 2009 in der Kategorie Suchmaschinentechnologie ausgezeichnet.

Die vionto GmbH mit ihrer grafischen Wissensmaschine eyePlorer.com wird vom SuMa e.V. und dem Bundesverband deutscher Internetportale (BDIP) mit dem Suchmaschinen-Award in der Kategorie Suchmaschinentechnologie geehrt. Der mit 2500 Euro dotierte SuMa Award ist ein Förderpreis für den freien Wissenszugang im Internet. Die prestigeträchtige Auszeichnung wird an Arbeiten oder Projekte verliehen, die praktische oder theoretische Aufgabenstellungen, Lösungen oder Probleme im Umgang mit dem digitalen Weltwissen aufgreifen. Die Qualität des Preises wird durch die große fachliche Kompetenz einer Jury, bestehend aus Mitgliedern des SuMa e.V. gewährleistet. Die Verleihung erfolgt im Rahmen des SuMa e.V. Kongresses, der am 10. September 2009 in der niedersächsischen Landesvertretung Berlin stattfindet.

Für die Fachjury stand der freie und effektive Zugang zu digitalem Wissen bei ihrer Bewertung im Mittelpunkt. „Wesentlich ist es, dass wir nicht bei der Technologie – die durchaus wichtig ist – stehen bleiben, sondern die Wirkung der digitalen Informationsströme auf die globale Wissensgesellschaft insgesamt bewerten“, so Dr. Wolfgang Sander-Beuermann, Geschäftsführer des SuMa e.V. Auf Grund dieser Kriterien hat sich die Jury für eyePlorer.com als Gewinner im Bereich Suchmaschinentechnologie entschieden.

„eyePlorer.com verfolgt eine andere Strategie als die bekannten großen Suchmaschinen. Dass dieser Ansatz nun mit dem wichtigsten deutschen Suchmaschinen-Award gewürdigt wird, freut uns natürlich sehr und macht das gesamte Team von vionto überglücklich. Die Suchmaschine von Morgen ist eine Wissensmaschine die nicht nur Informationen liefert, sondern die Informationen für die Nutzer aufbereitet und die Ergebnisse visuell darstellt“, erklärt der Hirnforscher und Geschäftsführer der vionto GmbH Dr. Martin Hirsch. „Dieser fantastische Preis bekräftigt unser Vorhaben und treibt uns zusätzlich an, eyePlorer.com weiter zu entwickeln und den eingeschlagenen Weg konsequent weiter zu verfolgen.“

Gleichzeitig zum Gewinn des SuMa Awards erscheint eine weiterentwickelte Version von eyePlorer.com. Die neue Version enthält einige hochinteressante Funktionen. Neben einer verbesserten Optik wurden hilfreiche Features eingebaut, um die Suche nach Informationen weiter zu verbessern und auszubauen. Zusätzlich zu den bekannten Fakten und Relationen werden nun im Info-Fenster auch Web- und twitter-Ergebnisse, sowie Bilder zu den Suchbegriffen angezeigt. Ein weiteres Highlight ist der neue Wikipedia-Reader. Mit einem simplen Klick können Nutzer nun zwischen der Darstellung von Konzepten und semantischen Beziehungen auf der Scheibe und dem Wikipedia-Artikel zum jeweiligen Suchbegriff hin und her wechseln.

Testen Sie den Preisträger mit seinen neuen Funktionen unter http://eyePlorer.com

Several teachers, lecturers and academics mention eyePlorer.com in their blogs and describe interesting use cases of our graphical knowledge engine. Following is a short summary of some of these articles.

In his blog Free Technology for Teachers, Richard Byrne refers to eyePlorer.com as a highly visual and interactive tool for exploring Wikipedia. He especially likes that students can make themselves familiar with a new topic in a very quick and efficient manner without having to read entire Wikipedia articles instead.

An interesting slideshow was created by Cheryl Capozzoli, titled Integrating Web 2.0 Applications into the elementary Classroom. Cheryl points out that eyePlorer.com can help students to improve their vocabulary skills by visually explaining the relations between individual words.

Another application area for eyePlorer.com is to assist student research, as described by Mary Howard in her Your Smarticles blog. According to Mary, students have their main problems in the initial phase of research. Due to the plethora of resources available online, her students quickly become disoriented when working their way through multiple websites. This is why Mary began to search for tools that solve this particular problem. She recommends eyePlorer.com as a tool that helps students in the development of a clear and focused research statement. As an interesting side effect, students can quickly collect a list of relevant keywords that help them with their research.

Kelly Tenkely characterizes her way of integrating eyePlorer.com into the classroom in her iLearn Technology blog. She states that eyePlorer.com gives her students a sort of visual guidance for their research and enables them to carry out their research in a rather unique way. Another interesting feature is, according to Kelly, for the whole class to use eyePlorer.com on an interactive whiteboard so that the whole group can brainstorm and decide which concepts and facts are important for the research task at hand. “What a great introduction to any new material. This site will definitely help whet students appetite for learning!”

Another very interesting and comprehensive slideshow comes from Tristan Mether: Cool Web 2.0 Tools for really cool schools. He recommends helpful tools for teachers who would like to engage their students by introducing new approaches of virtual learning into the classroom.

Working with eyePlorer.com in the classroom has many advantages. This is shown by Mike King on techntuit.pbworks. Students use eyePlorer.com as a search engine and a powerful graphical organizer which helps them in arranging their ideas and relations to other concepts. Teachers can help their students by putting their ideas into a larger perspective and by forming their own point of view with regard to a new topic.

Teacher trainer Nik Peachey goes one step further and adds a screencast to his article titled Note taking tool for digital literacy. Nik Peachey states that eyePlorer.com is a great tool that can help students to organise and to structure their essays and to develop their digital literacy skills. His second point is that eyePlorer.com helps students to learn how to use web resources in an effective way and that it is more than inadequate to copy and paste entire articles.

Are you a teacher? Do you use eyePlorer.com in class? We would like to hear from you!

We want to thank all the authors and look forward to further posts!

Sascha Schmidtlein wrote an interesting article titled Online-Tool für Suche, Recherche und zur Ideenfindung: eyePlorer.com (German only). The article provides a short overview of eyePlorer.com’s features and discusses the idea of using the graphical knowledge engine as a creativity tool, especially for bloggers who would like to write about a certain topic. You could also use the associations presented by eyePlorer.com as ideas for keywords or tags.

Thanks a lot for the article, Sascha!

Today we released a new version of our graphical knowledge engine eyePlorer.com. This new release, codename “flyspot”, features a radar view whose size we increased significantly so that users with rather small displays can make best possible use of the application.

The new release of eyePlorer.com, codename "flyspot"

We also improved the layout algorithm, the font size handling and the category colours to bring even more visual appeal to eyePloring knowledge. Another handy feature is available in the upper right hand corner of the radar view: using the inner search you can filter the set of concept names to only those that match a certain pattern (such as “museum” on the “Berlin” eyeMap). Several interface controls which used to be available directly can now be found behind the “View” menu: the number of concepts (from 20 to 500), language (English or German), the “show facts after mouseclick” checkbox with which you can disable the mouseover popup windows and a function to disable the tips and hints which are displayed below the radar view.

We also improved the notepad: a new “Settings” tab enables users to change the font-size as well as the password. Furthermore, you can finally add your individual notes in addition to the facts, concepts and categories that you collect on the notepad. The knowledge base which you can access using eyePlorer.com was also expanded significantly.

We hope you like the new version! Feel free to tell us what you think of the new release in the comments.

If you enjoy using eyePlorer.com we would like to invite you to become a fan on our facebook page. You can also follow us on twitter.

We’re organising a workshop on the topic Computerlinguistische Anwendungen und deren Potential für die Wirtschaft: Vom Forschungsprototyp zum Produkt (German only). The workshop will be held in conjunction with the GSCL conference 2009 which will take place in Potsdam at the end of September. Today we extended the deadline to July 31 – should you be interested in the topic of computational linguistics applications for production systems, please drop me a line or submit a paper.

We’re still under embargo but we have some very exciting news coming up in the next couple of weeks and months. Please stay tuned.

The current issue of MACup magazine has an article titled Die Nadel im Heuhaufen (p. 70-73) which presents several alternative search engines. Apart from Bing, Google Squared and Wolfram Alpha the author mentions eyePlorer.com which he calls “revolutionary”.