Wiseman 1.0 Wiseman finds the relationships between concepts and entities. A concept is an intangible thing, an idea. An entity is something or someone you can get in contact with. By finding the relationships between entities and concepts you can determine who the best person to ask about a problem is or which company makes a specific product or that ODBC is often mentioned in relation to data bases. It saves you the trouble of keeping who said what straight and will help you find relationships you may not have noticed before. Wiseman works in a very simple manner. You first enter all the concepts and entities you want Wiseman to care about in to its data base then give it blocks of text called articles. Wiseman scans the articles for any mention of the concepts and entities it knows about and creates a series of links between them. The strength of the link is based on how often the two items appear together and how highly rated the article is. To create the relationships press the big chain icon on the right of the main window. The linking process can take a while so please be patient. Once you have created a series of links you can search them and find relationships between them. In the image below you can see the Wiseman main interface. The user has just searched for "Apple" and has found a series of items related to it. The strength of the relationship can be changed manually by moving the slider. This allows the user to correct any misconceptions Wiseman may have had about the relationship. Clicking on the papers in the Articles column brings up the article list window where the user can browse through the articles that prove the relationship. Control-clicking on a row will bring up a context menu that will allow you find items related to the item on that row, open their website, send them email, inspect them and get a better look at the icon. As a rule of thumb: Inspects the selected item. Opens the items web page. Sends email to the selected item. Denotes a search field or relationship lookup. Wiseman offers serveral services in the Services Menu. Two of them allow the user to add articles to its data base and the rest are handy shortcuts. Add My Selection As An Article does just that. All the selected text will be added to the article data base. Add Selected Files As Articles adds all readable files in the Workspace selection to the article data base. Open Related Web Site uses the selected text to search the entiy data base and find an entity whose name or an alias matches the text. If it has an associated web site then that site is then opened. Send Them E-Mail does the same as above only it finds their email address and opens the mail program to send them a message. Find Related Items behaves as if you had just entered the selected text into the Wiseman search field. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Notes: Sorry for the shoddy documentation. It will be updated at a later time. Future features will inculde the ability for Wiseman to talk amongst themselves via the internet, probably using email then, later, CGI queries. Some of the code is already written for this... I just ran out of time. Since this is also my first OpenStep program the structure could use a little cleaning up. Ideally I'd like the GUI application to just talk to a Wiseman daemon that could serve up requests through Distributed Objects. Currently the "data base" is just a series of flat files. The advantage is any program can read them the disadvantage is the speed. I was thinking about moving to a real SQL data base but wanted to get a handle on AppKit and Foundation before moving on to Enterprise Objects. Once I have a structure I'm happy with and remove any thing that makes me look like an idiot I'll be releasing the code. Right now I wouldn't want anyone trying to learn from the Wiseman code, it was a learning experience for me but I think it would teach more bad habits and hacks than anything else. All the artwork in Wiseman was shamelessly ripped off from other sources inculding: Mac OS X Server icons from Apple Computer WebObjects .woo icon from Apple Computer "Big Chain Link" icon from Slashdot.org. Little book icon from OmniDictionary. I hope nobody minds since they're all freely available but if you do please email me at guy.english@sympatico.ca and I'll remove it as soon as possible.