We have taken data available in Wikidata and DBpedia on 'Military Conflicts' to create this interactive visualisation in nodegoat: 
 
 Wikidata 
 
 From the outside, it can be a challenge to keep up with all the developments within the ever expanding universe of wiki*/*pedia. So it's good to be reminded now and then of all the structured data that has become available thanks to their efforts: 
 
 This looks pretty neat, especially since Wikidata currently has over 947 million triples in their data store. Since battles usually have a place and a date, it would be nice to import this data into a data design in nodegoat and visualise these battles through time and space (diachronic geospatiality ftw). 
 
 So we checked the Wikidata sparql-endpoint to see what we can work with. Currently, there are 8049 instances of battles . If we select all the battles that have a location and a date, we are left with 410 battles. This query does not take into account that the location may be stored on a deeper level (as these battles may have a ‘place’ that has a location) and that the date may be stored as a ‘start time’ and ‘end time’. To take this into account, we use the following query: 
 
 PREFIX wd: < http://www.wikidata.org/entity/> PREFIX wdt: < http://www.wikidata.org/prop/direct/> PREFIX rdfs: < http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#> SELECT ?subject ?label ?coordinates (CONCAT(STR(DAY(?date)),"-",STR(MONTH(?date)),"-",STR(YEAR(?date))) as ?displaydate) (CONCAT(STR(DAY(?start)),"-",STR(MONTH(?start)),"-",STR(YEAR(?start))) as ?displaystart) (CONCAT(STR(DAY(?end)),"-",STR(MONTH(?end)),"-",STR(YEAR(?end))) as ?displayend) WHERE { ?subject wdt:P31 wd:Q178561 . OPTIONAL { ?subject rdfs:label ?label FILTER (lang(?label) = "en") . } OPTIONAL { ?subject wdt:P580 ?start . } OPTIONAL { ?subject wdt:P582 ?end . } OPTIONAL { ?subject wdt:P625 ?coordinates . } OPTIONAL { ?subject wdt:P585 ?date . } OPTIONAL { ?subject wdt:P276 ?location . ?location wdt:P625 ?coordinates . } OPTIONAL { ?subject wdt:P361 ?war . ?war wdt:P580 ?start . ?war wdt:P582 ?end . } } 
 
 Here we use OPTIONAL to be able to include all available objects (even if they miss a property). Eventually we gathered 2657 battles that have both a location and a date. After a bit of cleaning (you can do this in Open Refine, or even in LibreOffice Calc or Excel), we've imported this set into nodegoat: 
 
 You can use the timeline to scroll through time. We’ve added a colour scheme to differentiate between periods in time. Click here to view this in a new window. Clicking a dot opens a dialogue with a link to the object in Wikidata. 
 
 DBPedia 
 
 Last Friday, we noticed the buzz around the #dbpediadenhaag event and the discussions about the data DBPedia has harvested from Wikipedia. So we queried the DBpedia sparql-endpoint to see what battles they have in store. We found 12674 instances of MilitaryConflict. Of these, 4022 have date and location properties. 
 
 SELECT DISTINCT ?battle (SAMPLE(?dates) as ?date) ?location WHERE { ?battle rdf:type dbo:MilitaryConflict . ?battle dbo:date ?dates . ?battle georss:point ?location . } 
 
 If we look a level deeper for dates and locations we get 10116 battles that have a place and a date reference. The dates are messier than the dates available through Wikidata (as these have been harvested), so a bit more clean up is required here to get a workable list. Once we’ve imported this into nodegoat, we get this result. We can also combine both sets (with a total of 12703 records). And highlight the provenance of each dot. 
 
 Most of the differences are a result of the messy dates in DBpedia. For example, compare dbp:date in this DBpedia record with the date in the infobox (which DPpedia harvests) of the original Wikipedia article. Other differences are due to the fact that we picked one location per battle and rounding of the latitude and longitude values. 
 
 Furthermore, we found that very little statements in Wikidata had a proper reference and most of them referenced only to ‘French Wikipedia’/‘English Wikipedia’ etc (which was already noted by this report). See this article on the overlaps/differences between Wikidata and DBpedia. 
 
 Connecting the Dots 
 
 Once we had this up and running we checked what kind of objects relate to the events we found. There seems to be quite some data on the American Civil War in Wikidata, so we made a query to list the people who were present at the battles we identified earlier. This data allowed us to connect battles based on people who moved from one battle to another. 
 
 We also included the births and deaths of these people to be able to produce this visualisation: 
 
 Click here to view this in a new window. The 1957 death is William Lundy, see him singled out here. 
 
 Data 
 
 CSV-files generated and used: ||||| Union reenactors takes part in a demonstration of a battle during ongoing activities commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, Friday, June 28, 2013, at at Bushey Farm in Gettysburg,... (Associated Press) 
 
 On the second day of fighting at Gettysburg, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee listened to scouting reports, scanned the battlefield and ordered his second-in-command, James Longstreet, to attack the Union Army's left flank. 
 
 It was a fateful decision, one that led to one of the most desperate clashes of the entire Civil War _ the fight for a piece of ground called Little Round Top. The Union's defense of the boulder-strewn promontory helped send Lee to defeat at Gettysburg, and he never again ventured into Northern territory. 
 
 Why did the shrewd and canny Lee choose to attack, especially in the face of the Union's superior numbers? 
 
 While historians have long wrestled with that question, geographers and cartographers have come up with an explanation, by way of sophisticated mapping software that shows the rolling terrain exactly as it would have appeared to Lee: From his vantage point, he simply couldn't see throngs of Union soldiers amid the hills and valleys. 
 
 "Our analysis shows that he had a very poor understanding of how many forces he was up against, which made him bolder," said Middlebury College professor Anne Knowles, whose team produced the most faithful re-creation of the Gettysburg battlefield to date, using software called GIS, or geographic information systems. 
 
 Developed for the Smithsonian Institution to mark Gettysburg's 150th anniversary, the panoramic map went live on the Smithsonian website Friday, giving history buffs a new way to look at the Civil War's pivotal battle, which took place July 1-3, 1863. 
 
 "Our goal is to help people understand how and why commanders made their decisions at key moments of the battle, and a key element that's been excluded, or just not considered in historical studies before, is sight," Knowles said. 
 
 Long before the advent of reconnaissance aircraft and spy satellites, a general's own sense of sight _ his ability to read the terrain and assess the enemy's position and numbers _ was one of his most important tools. Especially at Gettysburg, where Lee was hampered by faulty intelligence. 
 
 "We know that Lee had really poor information going into the battle and must have relied to some extent on what he could actually see," Knowles said. 
 
 The geographer applied GIS to find out what Lee could see and what he couldn't. 
 
 To reconstruct the battlefield as it existed in 1863, researchers used historical maps, texts and photos to note the location of wooden fences, stone walls, orchards, forests, fields, barns and houses, as well as the movement of army units. High-resolution aerial photos of the landscape yielded an accurate elevation model. All of it was fed into a computer program that can map data. 
 
 Lee is believed to have surveyed the battlefield from a pair of cupolas, one at a Lutheran seminary and the other at Gettysburg College, both of which yielded generally excellent views. 
 
 But a GIS-generated map, with illuminated areas showing what Lee could see and shaded areas denoting what was hidden from his view, indicates the terrain concealed large numbers of Union soldiers. 
 
 "What really came through as a new discovery for us in this project was seeing how few federal forces Lee could see, particularly on Day 2, when he decides to send Longstreet," Knowles said. 
 
 Historian Allen Guelzo, who wasn't involved in the project, agreed that Lee's view probably misled him. Guelzo, director of Civil War-era studies at Gettysburg College, took a visitor up to the school's cupola and motioned toward the peak of Little Round Top, just visible in the distance. 
 
 "You can see a lot from up here, and Robert E. Lee might have thought on July 2 that he had seen everything," said Guelzo, who has written a new book on the Battle of Gettysburg. "But, in fact, the dips and folds of the ground, the foliage as it was on the ground in various groves and woods, all of that concealed what turned out to be the deadly truth." 
 
 Conversely, the Union Army occupied higher ground, and used it to great advantage. 
 
 Union Gen. Gouverneur Warren spied Longstreet's troops just as they were about to launch their attack on an undefended Little Round Top. Frantic, Warren dispatched an officer to round up reinforcements. They got there just in time, and withstood the Confederates. 
 
 In Warren's case, GIS confirmed what historians have long known. 
 
 For Knowles, the mapping project and the mysteries it revealed helped Gettysburg come alive. 
 
 "Commanders always had to make decisions with really limited information ... committing men's lives to scraps of information or intuition, or what you can see at a certain day or a certain time," she said. "This analysis, for me, is making the battle more human." 
 
 ___ 
 
 Online: 
 
 Smithsonian interactive map: http://bit.ly/1crQWYd
– Researchers have used data harvested from Wikipedia and DBpedia to create a map of all the wars—at least those that have been documented—since 2500 BC. That's 12,703 battles, Sputnik News reports. Variously colored dots on the map represent battles from different time periods. Clicking on a dot yields available information about the conflict, including the name of the battle and its location. Check out the map here.