Tag: magewithgephi

Mapping How Programming Languages Influenced Each Other According to Wikipedia

By way of demonstrating how the recipe described in Visualising Related Entries in Wikipedia Using Gephi can easily be turned to other things, here’s a map of how different computer programming languages influence each other according to DBpedia/Wikipedia:

Here’s the code that I pasted in to the Request area of the Gephi Semantic Web Import plugin as configured for a DBpedia import:

prefix gephi:<http://gephi.org/>
prefix foaf: <http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/>
CONSTRUCT{
  ?a gephi:label ?an .
  ?b gephi:label ?bn .
  ?a <http://dbpedia.org/ontology/influencedBy> ?b
} WHERE {
?a a <http://dbpedia.org/ontology/ProgrammingLanguage>.
?b a <http://dbpedia.org/ontology/ProgrammingLanguage>.
?a <http://dbpedia.org/ontology/influencedBy> ?b.
?a foaf:name ?an.
?b foaf:name ?bn.
}

As to how I found the <http://dbpedia.org/ontology/ProgrammingLanguage&gt; relation, I had a play around with the SNORQL query interface for DBpedia looking for possible relations using queries along the lines of:

SELECT DISTINCT ?c WHERE {
?a <http://dbpedia.org/ontology/influencedBy> ?b.
?a rdf:type ?c.
?b a ?c.
} limit 50 offset 150

(I think a (as in ?x a ?y and rdf:type are synonyms?)

This query looks for pairs of things (?a, ?b), each of the same type, ?c, where ?b also influences ?a, then reports what sort of thing (?c) they are (philosophers, for example, or programming languages). We can then use this thing in our custom Wikipedia/DBpedia/Gephi semantic web mapping request to map out the “internal” influence network pertaining to that thing (internal in the sense that the things that are influencing and influenced are both representatives of the same, erm, thing…;-).

The limit term specifies how many results to return, the offset essentially allows you to page through results (so an offset of 500 will return results starting with the 501st result overall). DISTINCT ensures we see unique relations.

If you see a relation that looks like dbpedia:ontology/Philosopher, put it in and brackets (<>) and replace dbpedia: with http://dbpedia.org/ to give something like <http://dbpedia.org/ontology/Philosopher&gt;.

PS see how to use a similar technique to map out musical genres ascribed to bands on WIkipedia