That's really cool! The problem seems to be that for all these things the data isn't stored anywhere in an easily digestible format. It would be great if you could query something and procedurally generate any of these graphs.

DBpedia appears to have historical data extracted from Wikipedia, not sure how usable it is: http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1205/1205.4138.pdf

Found a UI demo & thesis project for DBpedia GIS: http://latemar.science.unitn.it/spacetime/usecase.html & http://latemar.science.unitn.it/spacetime/FabioValsecchi-the...

That's where I've got all my initial seed data from already!

Does that mean you've converted it into a more digestible format that others could use :)

I have - you can checkout https://github.com/twistedvisions/anaximander and build it using my parser from a dbpedia dump!