A data-based tribute to the International Owl Awareness Day
Did you know that the 4th of August is International Owl Awareness Day? Me neither until idle browsing on cute owl memes led me to this website. Then, as we recently found a lovely owl family in our garden, I thought I would check them out on Wikipedia — and was stunned to see that there are 254 owl species recorded on Wiki, our favorite free open-access knowledge source. The only logical next step was to turn this into a data visualization to better understand the international owl landscape.
Namely, I will automatically download the full list of owl species and then their Wikipedia profiles. Then, I will use text matching and the NetworkX graph analytics library to extract the similarity network of the owl species, which I will then visualize. This way, we will have a visual representation of the owl species, which makes it much easier to interpret the relationship between different species.
Additionally, while the topic owl is timely here, the methods and steps are easily adaptable to any other topic we would like to cover and turn into a knowledge graph relying on the publicly available Wikipedia database.
All images were created by the author.
