When we first started doing research into First World War centenary events, we looked for an easy to use timeline of events so we could keep an eye on major anniversaries and see where we were on the timeline, 100 years later.  Surprisingly, I couldn’t find any timelines in openly licensed, structured data form.  So I took the liberty of cleaning up the data from the Wikipedia timeline of WWI and putting together a first stab at a csv file for public use.

WWI-events-wikipedia-links.csv

Please feel free to use this data however you like.  Design up a sweet WWI anniversary calendar, create a tweetbot, a blog highlighting the events of the War 100 years later, your own javascript timeline with Timeline JS, or something nobody but you has ever thought of.  Also, feel free to make improvements on the data itself, RDFize it, convert it to XML, map it to the Europeana Data Model, etc.  This was just a quick first draft for our own uses. I’ve put it up on github if you’d like share your data modifications.

We’d love to hear what you do with the data, just let us know in the comments!