Owen Cornec, a computer science masters student and data visualisation fanatic, has created WikiGalaxy -- a 3D web experiment that visualises Wikipedia as a galactic web of information. "I always had a visual way of thinking as a kid, and Wikipedia represented a huge network of knowledge," Cornec tells WIRED.co.uk. "WikiGalaxy is just how I imagined it, and I just wanted to show people that."
Juggling his masters degree and internships, Cornec's been working on and off this project, which he launched in April 2014.
To create his sprawling galaxy of information, Cornec used 100,000 of 2014's most popular Wikipedia articles, all clustered with hyperlinks.
He states that in this world, Wikipedia articles are
stars, which "allow you to be on a journey through knowledge". "The most interesting thing is hopping around the links and being spontaneous. You're not stuck in a small bubble," he says. "The Fly button, gives you a first person view. It's like you're on a spaceship flying through knowledge."
Cornec's galactic creation gives visitors the freedom to decide their itinerary. People can either decide on a predetermined route by using the search function, or opt for a more spontaneous trip, by dipping directly into a cluster, or hopping from link to link. "I'm giving users a choice," says Cornec, who's set on developing this project. "I'm slowly adding stuff."
WikiGalaxy is as stunning as it is sprawling. And Cornec notes that the most fun part of the project was building the graph visualisation tool with Three.js -- a WebGL library. "The hardest part was translating 100,000 articles with 4.3 million links," he says. "I had to do a lot of calculations and analyses to work out how to translate this into a map."
Next up, Cornec wants to bring in the Oculus Rift, and notes that it would be interesting to see what his visitors are reading and visiting in real time.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
