I've been looking for a way to get a structured description of the biographies of the scientists through history. One of my investigation led to wikistory, a webstart application based on the data extracted from Wikipedia by the project DBPedia.However, the data collected from DBPedia are mostly based on the infoboxes and most of them are missing or are incomplete. (as an example this is ok for Darwin (happy birthday) but there is no box for Geor...
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I've been looking for a way to get a structured description of the biographies of the scientists through history. One of my investigation led to wikistory, a webstart application based on the data extracted from Wikipedia by the project DBPedia.
However, the data collected from DBPedia are mostly based on the infoboxes and most of them are missing or are incomplete. (as an example this is ok for Darwin (happy birthday) but there is no box for Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (last accessed February 14th 2008 20H46)). Moreover the informations stored in those infoboxes are missing the fields I needed: gender, a short biography, parents, children.... etc....
I eventually decided to go back to look after freebase wich I tested a few monthes ago and which was also introduced at scifoo:
A screenshot of my final result is presented below:
and you can test this interface here:
http://lindenb.integragen.org/xulhistory/history.php
This is an interactive XUL page (it will only work with firefox) with a timeline containing a few hundred of scientists.
Just for fun, I also generated a time-based KML file for google-earth with those data.
http://lindenb.integragen.org/xulhistory/history.kml
The source code used to create this XUL page is available at here.
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