Roget2000: a 2D hyperbolic tree visualization of Roget's Thesaurus

Thesauri, such as Roget's Thesaurus, show the semantic relationships among terms and concepts. Understanding these relationships can lead to a greater understanding of linguistic structure and could be applied to creating more efficient natural-language recognition and processing programs. A general assumption is that focus and context displays of hyperbolic trees accelerate browsing ability over conventional trees. It is believed that allowing the user to visually browse the thesaurus will be more effective than keyword searching, especially when the terms in the thesaurus are not known in advance. The visualization can also potentially provide insight into semantic structure of terms. The novelty of this visualization lay in its implementation of various direct manipulation functions, tightly coupled windows, and how data is read into visualization. The direct manipulation functions allow the user to customize the appearance of the tree, to view the density of terms associated with particular concepts, and to view the thesaurus entries associated with each term. Input data is in an XML file format. The extensibility and ability to model complex hierarchies made XML a convenient choice. The object-oriented design of the code allows for displaying virtually any hierarchical data if it is in the XML format.