This project contains tools to visualise the animal kingdom as a graph. There are two components: a Wikipedia scraper; and a graph visualisation web app.

A Wikipedia scraper implemented in Golang which builds a graph of the animal kingdom. The Colly web crawler package and Goquery package are used to traverse Wikipedia pages related to animal species. Data from each page related to an animal species is stored in an Arango graph database along with the related taxonomic hierarchy.

There are many animal species which do not fit neatly into a consistent taxonomic heirarchy. To simplify things, only species whose taxonomic heirarchy matches the below sequence are extracted and stored.

kingdom -> phylum -> class -> order -> family -> genus -> species

To install the dependencies and build the binary run the below commands from the wiki-scraper directory.

go get
go build

To run an Arango DB server run the below command.

docker-compose up

Now the scraper can be launched with the below command.

cd ./wiki-scraper && wiki_scraper

A graph visualiser implemented as a backend Golang API to serve data from the ArangoDB database, and a Vue.js SPA to visualise the graph data interactively with Cytoscape.js. Clicking on nodes in the graph will retrieve child nodes from the backend API or cache and display them. Clicking an already populated node will remove the child nodes from the graph.

Install the backend API dependencies.

pushd graph-vis/backend
go get
popd

Install the frontend SPA dependencies.

pushd graph-vis/frontend
npm install
popd

To run an Arango DB server run the below command.

docker-compose up

Run the backend API to serve the graph data with the below command.

cd ./graph-vis/backend && air

Run the frontend dev server to visualise the graph data with the below command.

cd ./graph-vis/frontend && npm run dev