The goal of this project is to construct a knowledge graph that shows how various concepts are related to each other. These relationships will help us construct the natural path from a basic concept to a more advanced one, providing also an outline of the concepts that must be covered to fully understand the topic. Secondly, the graph also serves as a tool to identify topics in a text such as an article or lecture transcript.

A prototype of the concept is hosted at LearnY, for which the program analyzed about 20,000 pages from wikipedia containing the term astronomy to build a knowledge graph that not not only identied the important terms, but also how these terms are connected to each other. It is shown as an interactive graph using the d3js javascript graphics library. Each node in the graph represents a term relevant to astronomy and the width of the line joining nodes corresponds to the strength of connections between them. All nodes in the same order (connected directly to astronomy are of order: 1, those through another node are of order: 2 and so on) have the same color. The text overlay can be toggled by the keyboard shortcut “t”. Place the mouse cursor over a node to highlight its immediate neighbors.

The strongest connections between a target concept and astronomy can be calculated by entering a term in the search box. The program analyzes all paths containing up to 6 intermediate nodes to find the best three paths. A short description of the intermediate concepts can be accessed by clicking on the title. The program works reasonably well for common subtopics of astronomy, but currently favors longer connections. More work in optimizing the search algorithm is required.