WW1 Map - AI in Action ✌️

WW1 Map is an interactive map that visualizes the movements and actions of French infantry regiments during World War I.

It is based exclusively on authentic historical data, extracted from regimental histories and processed using Gemini (thinking mode) to identify meaningful events. The resulting data is structured and stored in a MongoDB database, then displayed on the map in a clear and accessible format.

This project was inspired by data visualizations like Ventusky, with the goal of making invisible or abstract information visible and intuitive, bringing forgotten documents to life.

🛠️ The project is still under development.

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Features

• Display of a regiment’s events: movements, battles, orders, losses, etc.
• Interactive map with geolocated actions
• Filters by date and location
• Display of the source document used to extract each event

Next Steps

• Display complete regiment paths on the map
• Show the exact page from the source for better historical context
• Embed all events into a vector database for LLM-based querying

Data Source

During World War I, French regiments maintained Journaux de Marche et Opérations (JMO), or war diaries, where they recorded daily operations: troop movements, engagements, reconnaissance, positions, losses—sometimes with maps or sketches.
These were handwritten on the frontlines, often under harsh and improvised conditions.

Examples of JMOs, Full list

After the war, mostly between 1919 and 1920, regimental histories were published, often written by former officers or military historians.
They synthesize the JMOs, enhance them with strategic context, maps, and narrative accounts. This project is based on this second type of document.

Examples of regimental histories, Full list

Processing Pipeline

📥 Book Extraction

• Downloads regimental histories from Argonnaute using a Violentmonkey script
• Output file: regiments_complet.json

📄 PDF to Markdown Conversion

• Converts PDF documents to Markdown format to make them usable by LLMs

🧠 Event Extraction

• Generates a regimental summary using this prompt
• Extracts three types of events using this prompt:
  • Political events
  • Troop movements
  • Military engagements
• Stores the events in a MongoDB database

🌍 Data Enrichment

• Find the exact location of places mentioned in the event descriptions and titles in order to convert them into GPS coordinates. (prompts)

🙏 Credits

Big thanks to Google for the generous Gemini API free tier.