[Proposal] Periodic table

[OrkoHunter]

Summary

Show periodic table.

Example search queries

• periodic table
• mercury
• helium
• hydrogen
• oxygen

Implementation (optional)

Find some science library.

Context

[hargup]

(Meta: This comment is for me, I usually keep such notes in my personal docs. Though I regularly lose them and can't find them later when I really want it)

I started writing the periodic table app, researched a few solutions. Then played in my head how can I use them. Then find few breadcrumbs and researched some more. What was the chain:

• Looked for periodic table javascript apps. Found some implementation, a lot are good, none are "perfect".
  • Periodic table implementation using HTML, CSS + JS https://github.com/CFWS/Periodic
  • Raw JSON data for periodic table elements https://github.com/andrejewski/periodic-table/blob/master/data.json
• Decided I should just table of element data when someone searches for an element, say "Hydrogen". The table of data exists here https://github.com/andrejewski/periodic-table/blob/master/data.json
• Then, I said to myself, "We need an image related to the element here." And where can be find the image? Its wikipedia. And if we getting the data from Wikipedia, why not show the whole infotable from wikipedia. So I started searching for wikipedia infobox extractor.
  • Found: https://github.com/dbpedia/, TBH I am still not sure what is it good for.
    • https://github.com/dbpedia/fact-extractor ⇒ Extracts question answer sequences from Wikipedia pages.
    • The focus of DBPedia is again on wikipedia. Wikipedia is interesting, but not sure if it is super useful commercially. As in most useful data in day to day work is about people, companies or tools. This data is either too sparse or unavailable in wikipedia.
    • Also wikipedia being vast, is still too "generic", for example, it is unlikely to help in debugging issues with my code, or a create a nicer social preview image.
• Side note:
  • Its important that people can understand what are you doing, otherwise, they'll just look at it and move on. Happened to me for DBPedia, data.world and so many other things I came across.

Side Journeys:

• While looking at the periodic table data, came across a new element Tennessine, read its wikipedia page to confirm if it is actually named after the state of Tennessee, in the US.
• Found following dataset marketplaces:
  • https://www.dataandsons.com/
  • https://visualdata.io ⇒ Computer Vision Datasets

[hargup]

Writing periodic table in JS+CSS is non trivial. I would avoid writing the whole thing myself from scratch. Have asked the owner of periodict-table code to add an MIT license to the project https://github.com/dylanbyars/react-periodic-table/issues/1

[hargup]

I am not actively working on the issue, please feel free to pick it up.