Many-to-many set search technology in an impressive, open source JavaScript application Recently, David Huynh joined Freebase from the SIMILE project at MIT, and he’s already brought insight and technology from SIMILE to bear on Freebase: witness his Parallax prototype (see the screen shot at left; click on it for a full-size view).A normal search like Google returns a set of results and allows you to look at them one at a time. A normal information site like Wikipedia has individual articles on subjects, loosely joined by hyperlinks.Freebase adds a layer of ontology and semantic relations to information gleaned from sites like Wikipedia. So, for instance, an article about Jon Udell at Wikipedia says that he’s a U.S. journalist who used to work for InfoWorld and now works for Microsoft. A similar article about Jon at Freebase adds structured ontological classification information for Jon as a person and an author. So, for instance, you can find Jon in Freebase not only by name, but also by searching for authors or people born in Philadelphia in 1956, and you can also follow the Publishing relation to his book. Parallax takes advantage of that additional information to search Freebase with sets, examining many-to-many relationships. So, to use the example in David’s video, you can ask Parallax to find the collection of U.S. Presidents, filter that by Republicans, find all of their children, find all the places their children went to school, and create a map of those schools, using one search per step.Even better, David has open-sourced Parallax on Google Code. I pulled down the trunk source code from Subversion on Friday, and had a good look at it. It’s one honking sophisticated JavaScript application, which (if I read it right) uses SIMILE technology and jQuery to call the Freebase Metaweb API.Yes, there are bugs: it is, after all, a new prototype. One major bug is that every keystroke raises an error in IE 7 if debugging is enabled. It works fine on Firefox 3, however, although the error console does list a few CSS issues. There are also some issues that crop up when you do a search that returns a large set. Despite that, color me impressed. It’s nicely conceived, and very promising. Software Development