anadrome / academic-ancestors

Graph academic ancestors using Wikidata and graphviz

Academic ancestors from Wikidata

A few Python scripts that construct academic ancestor graphs (i.e. chains of Ph.D. students and their Ph.D. advisors). This is done by sending SPARQL queries to Wikidata that follow the doctoral advisor (P184) relations. See this blog post for an explanation and examples.

Required Python packages: requests, graphviz

There are currently two scripts:

ancestors2dot

Grab the complete ancestor tree of a specific researcher, and output it in graphviz DOT format.

Usage:

./ancestors2dot.py Qxxxxx [outfile.dot]

Qxxxxx: a researcher's Wikidata ID
outfile.dot: file to write to if supplied; otherwise write to stdout

You will need to have graphviz installed to actually graph the resulting DOT file, by doing something like:

dot -Tpng personA.dot > personA.png

common2dot

Given two researchers, graph the path to their most recent common ancestor, if any.

Usage:

./common2dot.py Q1xxxx Q2xxxx [outfile.dot]

Qxxxxx: two researchers' Wikidata IDs
outfile.dot: file to write to if supplied; otherwise write to stdout

Note that if the two researchers both have large ancestor trees, the query may time out. There is probably a way to optimize it so that doesn't happen (suggestions welcome).