ViziData - Wikidata

4 Jun 2015

I'd like to once more draw your attention to ViziData [1]. The project  
has matured a bit since I first brought it up here a few months ago.  
Most notably there is now an underlying tile map providing some  
orientation better integration and interaction between map and  
timeline and the possibility to list items aggregated in a map cell.

I created an overview page [2] for the Wikidata Visualization  
Challenge, which can aid as quick reference for usage of the  
application (although it is pretty cluttered). The version linked on  
that page is my submission to the challenge and already outdated  
though, the most up to date version should usually be found on the  
link in this mail [1].

There are only 2 new datasets, one is all locations that have a  
statement about their populations, however that needs some more work  
and fine tuning. The other is any item that has a coordinate location  
statement, filterable by the number of interwiki links. It shows a  
pretty good coverage of the world, bring some patience though because  
the 60mb json can take some time depending on the connection. Also,  
slower hardware might get a bit exhausted going through the ~2.1  
Million items.

I guess one can imagine various use cases for the application. For  
instance, here is the people who died in the Netherlands in 2015 in  
Vizidata [3]. Be aware however, that those haven't necessarily been  
Dutch and also it doesn't include Dutch people who died somewhere  
else. Comparing with Gerards list [4] there seem to be quite some  
people missing. That's mainly because items that don't have both a  
date of death and a place of death statement are dropped from the  
datasets. Maybe it would be an option to include country of  
citizenship as a fallback but it could lead to slightly incorrect  
representation of the data.

I hope this tool can provide some interesting insights and help to  
illustrate where there is most room for improvements in our data base.  
Feel free to comment if you have questions or proposals, or maybe an  
idea for a dataset that you would like to see in ViziData.

Georg

[1] http://wwwpub.zih.tu-dresden.de/~s5219191/vizidata/
[2] http://wwwpub.zih.tu-dresden.de/~s5219191/vizichallenge/
[3]  
http://wwwpub.zih.tu-dresden.de/~s5219191/vizidata/#d=0&m=humans&l=…
[4] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Jura1/Recent_deaths_in_the_Netherlands