About
"The Revolutionaries" is an explorer of the influence and relationships between different scientists, inventors and revolutionary thinkers. It was built in 24 hours at Science Hack Day, in June 2010 (and improved a fair bit, afterwards). There's a blog post about the app here.
Start exploring here...
The idea
The original idea was to help visualise how we arrive at great inventions, and how ideas evolve over time. For example, something like the space shuttle is the result of countless generations of converging technologies, and all the thought processes and new paradigms behind them.
The data
None of the information in this tool is stored within it. It is dynamically driven, largely by the crowd-sourced knowledge on Wikipedia. Data is then stored within your browser, to speed up navigation. Some of the technical details are explained in the blog post.
The code
The source code is free and open source, and available on GitHub. If you have any feedback or improvements, please let us know.
Who built it?
- @mia_out - original idea for exploring evolution of inventions over time; guidance on Science Museum data
- @premasagar - JavaScript, app creation, coordination
- @ironyboy - concept development, R & D'ing, YQL'ing
- @tommorris - SPARQL queries, DBpedia brains
- @yaili & @goodonpaper - design kung fu; markup & CSS
- @rboulton - R & D in scraping Science Museum collection to make an API
It's just a prototype
The app hasn't been rigourously cross-browser tested, and it doesn't warn you when things go wrong. If, for example, you suddenly stop seeing new content, this may be due to limits from the YQL service - just wait an hour and try again.
We won a bug
The hack won the "You know, for kids" award - for which we took home a prestigious, jittery electric bug! See all the other hacks...
