Border Explorer: viewing places that share border

Browse places that are connected by a border, connected as a graph.

This project contains a pipeline to extract from Wikidata all the elements that share a border, and then organize them by categories to present them in a convenient view:

Go to border explorer

Tech details

The first version was viewing only French communes; I rewrote the data pipeline in Rust and made it generic to support any Wikidata category. On the website are the top categories, by number of edges and connectivity ratio; minus some categories that are too broad or generic.

Instead of installing Blazegraph and learning SPARQL, I decided to do a first pass to put the data in an sqlite database; then a second pass generates geojson files to be viewed from SQL queries.

Dependencies

• lbzip2's lbzcat
• a recent rust toolchain
• a C compiler (to re-build sqlite)

Crates:

• chrono: for parsing times in the dumps
• rusqlite: for sqlite access - uses a bundled version of sqlite3
• memchr: for fast filtering before json parsing
• serde and serde_json: for JSON parsing and geojson file generation
• reqwest: for fetching category names from Wikidata (< 200 HTTP requests in a run)
• indexmap: for stable output generation

Frontend:

• Maplibre GL JS - for displaying the data on a WebGL-accelerated map widget (fork of Mapbox GL JS)
• Noto font, converted as PBF for OpenMapTiles (from Maplibre demo tiles).
• Earth coastlines extract from OpenStreetMap, converted to geojson.

Running, building, etc.

Build and run on a bz2 JSON dump of Wikidata, storing the extracted information in temporary sqlite database border-explorer.db:

cargo run --release border-explorer.db ./wikidata/latest-all.json.bz2

This will generate the geojson files in web/geojson/; you can then use the website statically with a webserver at the root of web/.

FAQ

Why do some categories have such an non-descriptive name?

It comes from Wikidata. Usually those categories have a good enough full description, but a very short name, like "district" or "province"; do not hesitate to contribute to Wikidata to improve those in your language!

Why do some categories seem to have incomplete information?

It comes from Wikidata. Do not hesitate to contribute!

Why do I only see names in English (or French)?

Sometimes there might not even be a name for any locale, so for english we fallback to mul, the multilingual label. But in general, I have only implemented getting the names for those two locales, I might do more if there is interest!

Why did you do this?

Good question. If you find out, let me know!

I am not happy with the names displayed, or the political borders described here

I invite you to open a discussion about this on Wikidata's wiki Discussion pages.