Several years ago in this newsletter, I wrote about Thinkmap from Plum Design, a tool for graphically depicting the relationships between entities. Since then, the company has changed its name to Thinkmap (see editorial links below) and added even more polish to an already slick tool.

Thinkmap has built a graphical version of a thesaurus, called Visual Thesarus, out of its visualization system. Visual Thesarus boasts more than 145,000 English words and 115,000 meanings. If you like language, this is a wonderful tool for exploring the sense of words.

You can try it out from the Visual Thesaurus home page - just enter a word in the field beneath the banner and a Java applet will load. Your word will be in the center and all related words will be displayed connected to it by "elastic links". The links are solid for directly related words and dashed where there is a relationship such as "is a type of" (mousing over the link displays the relationship).

You can grab any word to relocate it (useful on a crowded display) or click on a word to make it the "central" word in the display. Clicking on the speaker icon beside the central word will play an audio clip of the word being spoken.

Down the right hand side of the display are the definitions of the words broken into the parts of speech (nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs), while the controls across the top allow you to trace backwards and forwards through the sequence of words selected.

For language lovers this is cheap at $29.95 for the desktop edition or $19.95 per annum for the online edition (also available at $2.95 per month).

If you think this is cool and you'd like to use Thinkmap to display your data, a Software Developer's Kit is also available. This is an impressive system with support for database access, an XML underpinning, and GUI elements with CSS support along with documentation and examples.

The Thinkmap SDK is available in three editions: Standard, Professional, and Enterprise and pricing starts at $5,000. Educational discounts are available.

Mark Gibbs is a consultant, author, journalist, columnist and blogger.