Introducing WunderKind (Alpha)

Many of you know and love MindMeister’s Wunder features which enable you to automatically add related links (WunderLink), notes (WunderNote), images (WunderBild) or even tasks (WunderTask) to your topics. Today we are excited to introduce yet another member of our WunderFeature family: WunderKind. 

Magic Wand Button

WunderKind automatically searches the Internet for subtopics of an idea and inserts them into your map with a link to the source.

Using WunderKind

  • Click on the magic wand icon in the bottom left of your map editor to open the WunderKind toolbar.
  • Here, you can choose from three different sources: Wikipedia, Freebase and public MindMeister mind maps.
  • WunderKind will automatically present you with suggestions for subtopics whenever a new topic is added or an existing one is edited.
  • You can also trigger suggestions manually by clicking on the search button on the left side of the toolbar.
  • Select one or more entries from the suggestions to add them as subtopics to your map.

BEHIND THE SCENES Senior MindMeister Developer

“We have gone through multiple iterations and we have tried many sources to make sure we can provide the best possible suggestions,” explains Senior MindMeister Developer, Laura Bârlădeanu. “From Freebase, Wikipedia, Wikidata, Google Books, Twitter, to our own MindMeister public maps. In the end, we have chosen Freebase based on the quality of the results it provides. If you’re not familiar with it, Freebase is a service provided by Google and it’s a subset of their Knowledge Graph.

But even before we send our queries to Freebase, we have to make sure that we are sending the relevant information from your nodes, e.g. from a node containing “a day trip to Paris” you’d probably want to get Paris related travel tips. In order to achieve this we are running the node content through multiple steps of term extraction: Stanford Named Entity Recognizer, Term Extract and OpenCalais.

Since the Open Linked Data sources out there are numerous, the biggest challenge was finding one that was yielding good results for multiple domains and then finding a way to extract the relevant terms. While we’re still far from a perfect solution, we’re pretty happy with what we have got to show you so far.”

Vision

Besides saving you a ton of time by providing information and matching links to that information automatically, WunderKind has the potential to substantially increase your creativity and productivity while mind mapping. Even suggestions that don’t fit what you were looking for might be able to spark new ideas and thus lead you into new and unexpected directions. It is the first step towards an automated “mind mapping assistant” which, with time, could become as useful and natural to us as auto-correct.

This post was last updated on 5th October 2016

WunderKind is an outcome of the CODE project whose vision is to “empower users in analysing the vast body of scientific knowledge”. For more information on the CODE project visit code-research.eu.