WordNet® is an online lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current psycholinguistic theories of human lexical memory. English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into synonym sets, each representing one underlying lexical concept. Different relations link the synonym sets.

Wordnet is a database that comes with a query command line interface as well as a comprehensive collection of local interfaces. The python interface has been used by Trapdoor to create DrawBot (Mac only unfortunately) which is a Processing-like, but Python based, IDE. The output is simply amazing!

ConceptNet is a freely available commonsense knowledgebase and natural-language-processing toolkit which supports many practical textual-reasoning tasks over real-world documents right out-of-the-box (without additional statistical training)

ConceptNet is written completely in Python. The site has a flash demo on that demonstates it’s functionatily.

It’s not as pretty as DrawBot but the application itself seems a whole lot more accesable. WordNet is an academic tool where ConceptNet looks to give you more human feedback.

I’ll be playing with them over the next few days to see what they’re like.