Did you know that August 4th is International Owl Awareness Day? Me neither, until an idle search for cute owl memes led me to this website. Then, as we recently found a beautiful family of owls in our garden, I thought I'd look them up on Wikipedia, and I was surprised to see that there are 254 species of owls recorded on Wikiour favourite free and open source of knowledge. The next logical step was to turn this into a data visualisation to better understand the international landscape of owls.
Specifically, I will automatically download the complete list of owl species and then their profiles on Wikipedia. Then, I will use text matching and the NetworkX graph analysis library to extract the similarity network of owl species, which I will then visualize. This way, we will have a visual representation of owl species, making it much easier to interpret the relationship between different species.
Furthermore, while the owl topic is timely here, the methods and steps can be easily adapted to any other topic we want to cover and turned into a knowledge graph based on the publicly available Wikipedia database.
All images were created by the author.
