Creating mind maps with WebSummarizer

Mind maps are type of interactive diagrams used to represent concepts, tasks, or other ideas linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea.

Here is an example of a simple mind map. The central topic is about water and the supportive topics related to water are laid out around the central topic.

A simple mind map example  - Water as the central topic

A mind map communicates visually the key ideas very effectively. The key ideas are clearly visible. The picture provides a very compelling and informative description about the subject.

Mind maps have many applications in learning, brainstorming, business uses, problem solving, collaboration and note taking. It is a very effective tool for clear information structuring and visual summarization.

There is a variety of mind mapping software that provides rich tools for drawing mind maps. The leading mind mapping products also provide rich extensions to combine mind mapping with other productivity tools.

WebSummarizer is a text mining tool that works very effectively with mind mapping applications. It converts the text on web pages into essential summaries organized around the most important keywords. In an instant, a web page is converted into a Visual Summary:

Visual Summary generated by WebSummarizer

Visual Summary is easily exported to mind mapping applications. Here is an example of the process of:

1. creating a Visual Summary and then,
2. exporting the Visual Summary to 3 mind mapping applications: 

•        Mindjet MindManager, 
•        Xmind and 
•        MindGenius.

 

Creating mind maps with WebSummarizer

Once you export the Visual Summary to your mind mapping application you can easily edit and shape your mind map. Here are examples of the coffee mind map exported from WebSummarizer to MindManager, XMind and MindGenius:

MindGenius mind map generated by WebSummarizer

XMind mind map generated by WebSummarizer

MindManager mind map generated by WebSummarizer

Using WebSummarizer offers a powerful text mining tool and compelling visual presentation that is easily shared with other applications. WebSummarizer instantly converts text into easy to understand visuals and makes knowledge discovery both easy and pictorial. 

WebSummarizer facilitates creation of understanding by making key ideas VISIBLE

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About WebSummarizer  
 

WebSummarizer provides tools to VISUALIZE and SUMMARIZE web pages and documents.

The results are presented as interactive Visual Summaries,  Tree Views and a Keyword Clouds and can be downloaded easily published in blogs and websites

The Visual Summary can be navigated in any browser on Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, iPad and Android devices. The Keyword Cloud is linked with Wikipedia Knowledge Base. When you click on the keyword in the cloud you will be presented with an instant Visual Summary.

You can summarize text in English, French, German and Spanish.

The keywords and summaries are easily exported to other applications such as word editors, browsers, mind mapping applications like Mindjet MindManager, MindGenius, XMind, and any other mind mapping application.

FREE Trial here: WebSummarizer

The Power of Visual Summary

As Internet users we spend a significant amount of time examining search engine results.

For each search results we must click through many links to briefly evaluate each for possible relevance to a particular information we need. Improving the efficiency of this tedious process directly benefits the users.

The standard practice is to provide 1 sentence textual summary snippet by the search engine.  Specifically, Google shows up to 156 characters (including spaces) of a page’s meta description tag.

Here is a typical example of a Google summarization snippet:

Google summarization snippet

We believe that this practice can be significantly enhanced by providing the ability to automatically generate a more detailed visual and textual summaries of web pages.

Visual summaries greatly increase the efficiency by which readers evaluate and use search engine results. For example, keywords in visual summaries allow users to instantly see the most significant content at once without searches.

This visual presentation of the most pertinent information is a tremendous time saver. 

Let's look at an example of a Visual Summary for the "coffee"search term generated by WebSummarizer:

Visual Summary example

 
Advantages of Visual Summary presentation:

• Visual summaries conveniently aggregate the most important information around the key ideas. This makes it very easy to examine summaries by keywords.

•  In addition there are 2 options: Short Summary and Full Summary. Both summaries provides the most relevant extracts for quick orientation.
  

•  Visual Summary format enforces readability and with the highlighted keywords enhances quick comprehension of the textual summary.

• Visual presentation enhances ability to remember. It pairs the visual presentation with structured outline to make it easy to reuse the information when creating new documents.

• Providing the ability to expand and collapse the Visual Summary branches gives users great freedom to zoom in only on the points of interest.

The Visual Summary presentation makes it easy to understand and remember the key information.

Here is the dynamic Visual Summary of the coffee Wikipedia article:

                               VISUAL  SUMMARY                           

 

  
To navigate the Visual Summary:  
* click on any + or - next to a keyword in the map  
* or click on the Expand All or Collapse All buttons. ----------------------------------------------------------------   

 A bit of science

• Visual information presentation speeds up many tasks tremendously. We can get the gist of an image in 110 ms or less! (Coltheart, 1999)
• In that same 110 ms, we can read on average less than 1 word or skim two words. The average reader of English reads about 4.2 words per second and can skim or scan at roughly 17 words per second. (Chapman, 1993) 

References:

• Coltheart, V. (Ed.). (1999). Fleeting memories: Cognition of brief visual stimuli. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.).

• Chapman, A. (Ed.). (1993). Making sense: Teaching critical reading across the curriculum. New York: The College Board.).

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
About WebSummarizer  
 

WebSummarizer provides tools to VISUALIZE and SUMMARIZE web pages and documents.

The results are presented as interactive Visual Summaries,  Tree Views and a Keyword Clouds and can be downloaded easily published in blogs and websites

The Visual Summary can be navigated in any browser on Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, iPad and Android devices. The Keyword Cloud is linked with Wikipedia Knowledge Base. When you click on the keyword in the cloud you will be presented with an instant Visual Summary.

You can summarize text in English, French, German and Spanish.

The keywords and summaries are easily exported to other applications such as word editors, browsers, mind mapping applications like Mindjet MindManager, MindGenius, XMind, and any other mind mapping application.

FREE Trial here: WebSummarizer

Keywords and summaries are a quick test of informativeness

Illustation by Stephen Doyle

Writing in the Internet age is a particular form of  communication art where informativeness - the significance of provided information - must be delivered directly and without fluff. 

Linguistic studies show that there is a direct relation between language of informativeness and success or failure in keeping the reader’s attention.

Any indulgence in verbosity dilutes the message and tires the reader.

Reading is type of filtering and sorting exercise.

While we are reading, often scanning and skimming through the text, we are looking for words that catch our attention. These keywords, and often key phrases, serve as a highly condensed summary of the text.
Key phrases are often highlighted within the body of the document to facilitate users’ fast browsing and reading.

In the academic practice for publishing papers key phrases are usually manually assigned by authors, especially for journals, conference articles or back-of-the book indexes. However, the vast majority of documents such as news, magazine articles, web pages do not provide key phrases because the manual effort of assigning key phrases is too expensive.

It stands to reason that applying intelligent automated tools for summarizing is practical and helpful in improving  communication and speed up understanding.

One of such tools is WebSummarizer. Here is a sample of WebSummarizer’s Visual Summary based in this post:


 

To navigate the Visual Summary:
 * click on any + or - next to a keyword in the map
 * or click on the Expand All or Collapse All buttons.   
 
As we can see in this example, when we condense the text to a set of keywords and summaries this will provide an important measure of informativeness. It tells the reader what are the main topics and in what context these topics are discussed. This informativeness index is like a cognitive tool helping the readers to quickly gauge their interest in the text.

Moreover, readers can easily examine each keyword and the related summaries to quickly glance the details. The visualization of information  is one of the key advantages of Visual Summary presentation.

By visual examination of the key phrases and summaries it is much easier to make decision whether to read the piece in depth or just skip it.

Practice shows that  it is useful to automatically extract key phrases from web pages to accompany the main content of the document. And with automated tools such as WebSummarizer providing summaries is very easy.

Key phrases are all about being informative! 

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About WebSummarizer

WebSummarizer provides tools to VISUALIZE and SUMMARIZE web pages and documents.

The results are presented as interactive Visual Summaries,  Tree Views and a Keyword Clouds and can be downloaded easily published in blogs and websites

The Visual Summary can be navigated in any browser on Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, iPad and Android devices. The Keyword Cloud is linked with Wikipedia Knowledge Base. When you click on the keyword in the cloud you will be presented with an instant Visual Summary.

You can summarize text in English, French, German and Spanish.

The keywords and summaries are easily exported to other applications such as word editors, browsers, mind mapping applications like Mindjet MindManager, MindGenius, XMind, and any other mind mapping application.

FREE Trial here: WebSummarizer

Coffee - example of Personal Knowledgde Base

In my previous post "Why we need Personal Knowledge Bases?" I shared some points on the value and use of personal knowledge bases. 

In this post I provide an example of a modest knowledge base about coffee as the main subject.

As an example we will use Wikipedia where the topic of "Coffee" is used in several hundreds of articles.

For practical purposes I will present here the top 50 articles referring to "coffee" as a significant subject.

I use WebSummarizer to generate the Visual Summary and Keyword Cloud to present the key finding about the term "coffee". The Visual Summary can also be exported to other applications such as content management, data bases,mind mapping, word editors, etc.

Exporting the Visual Summaries is a very simple. Just select the desired application and click on the button:

Exporting summaries to word editors, web pages, and mind mapping applications

Additionally, the Visual Summaries and Keyword Clouds can be embedded in blogs and web pages by simply pasting HTML code:

Here is a Visual Summary example of the top 50 Wikipedia articles showing  the different contexts where the term "coffee" is used.

.

 

To navigate the Visual Summary:
 * click on any + or - next to a keyword in the map
 * or click on the Expand All or Collapse All buttons.   


To further explore the various contexts of "coffee" here is Keyword Cloud automatically generated by WikiSummarizer:

Coffee ring Kona coffee Coffee syrup Coffee cake White coffee Mr. Coffee Toddy coffee Glen Coffee Coffee Talk Boss Coffee Red Coffee Coffee table Tata Coffee Coffee Kids Coffeemaker Coffeeweed Coffeehouse Costa Coffee Coffee World MJB (coffee) AMT Coffee Bokar Coffee Miko Coffee Coffee shop Gimme Coffee Prima Coffee Coffee bean Iced coffee PJ's Coffee Coffee 1 Coffee Road John Coffee coffeeheaven H&C Coffee Irish coffee Coffee milk Peter Coffee Coffee pod Xen Coffee CoFFEE Paul Coffee Blenz Coffee Wawa coffee Coffee & TV W. J. Coffee MUD Coffee Java coffee Camp Coffee Coffee Coffee cup

Keywords are linked to Visual Summaries of Wikipedia articles – created by WebSummarizer


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About WebSummarizer

WebSummarizer provides tools to VISUALIZE and SUMMARIZE web pages and documents.

The results are presented as interactive Visual Summaries,  Tree Views and a Keyword Clouds and can be downloaded easily published in blogs and websites

The Visual Summary can be navigated in any browser on Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, iPad and Android devices. The Keyword Cloud is linked with Wikipedia Knowledge Base. When you click on the keyword in the cloud you will be presented with an instant Visual Summary.

You can summarize text in English, French, German and Spanish.

The keywords and summaries are easily exported to other applications such as word editors, browsers, mind mapping applications like Mindjet MindManager, MindGenius, XMind, and any other mind mapping application.

FREE Trial here: WebSummarizer