WebGL Galaxy from Wikipedia Articles



    Something similar to the Eye of Sauron is the result of rendering Wikipedia articles with building links between them. Star clusters are thematically related and linked articles. This is the idea of ​​the author of the WikiGalaxy project , a French student Owen Cornec.

    Clicking on each star opens the corresponding article and links to other articles. In a separate "flight" mode (fly-mode), navigation is performed from star to star with each click. In the upper left corner of the screen there is a search bar if you need to find something. The current beta version of WikiGalaxy contains only 100,000 article stars, but the student promises to add more in the future.

    Made on WebGL, the interface runs on Firefox and Chrome, but it will slow down on most computers. So in practice you won’t use it, although it looks very nice.

    Few screenshots





    Technically, the article graph is built using the Wikipedia PHP API queries by the Python script and Urliib3.

    The resulting graph in .dot format with article identifiers and links was uploaded to the Gephi data visualization program . Selecting the most attractive form of visualization, the author exported the result to GDV format with the coordinates of each node, and then converted it into a compact JSON file by another Python script.

    In parallel, he developed visualization for the web on Three.js, a fairly convenient WebGL library. Most of the information displayed is dynamically called by requests to the Wikipedia API.

    In the future, Owen Kornek is going to port this program to the Oculus Rift virtual reality interface.


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