Manan's notes

202408251440 Social personal knowledge graph

I want to build a social personal knowledge graph, using Wikipedia articles as a proxy. Some salient features of the UI/UX of the app:

  • The left side of the page is the regular Wikipedia interface. The right side of is a bidirectional graph of the world’s knowledge, centered on the entity being viewed in the Wikipedia page in the left pane.
  • You start with all the nodes in the graph as hidden/muted. As you read more articles on Wikipedia, more of your personal knowledge graph gets illuminated.
  • The graph remembers the articles you’ve read in the past, and when you stumble upon previously-read articles but from a different “direction” in the graph, it lets you know (in some suitably delightful way).
  • The graph can provide you suggestions for future topics to explore on the “outskirts” of your currently-traversed graph.
  • The history and texture of the graph is queryable through an intuitive (Datalog-backed) interface.
  • You can view the history of your knowledge graph at various points in the past.
  • You can share your knowledge graph with other people.

Why this project? Oh, it would be so much fun to build. I would be such a huge power-user. And I hope others would too — I would love to see the knowledge graphs of people like Tyler Cowen, Noam Chomsky, Nassim Taleb… and how they’ve evolved over time. I’m imagining Tyler’s heat map — dense pockets in history, economics, sociology, technology… what’s that spot over there? Oh, Spider-Man II[1].

[1] https://www.vox.com/2017/3/30/15122162/tyler-cowen-ezra-klein-interview-podcast