Hello Richard
The exact date business is a real problem for heritage in all sorts of ways. Writing 01/01/1463 is inaccurate if only the year is known - it doesn't feel good entering a false date. And in date formats where you are allowed to enter a null value for month and date the search is not consistent across old and contemporary dates. This is why, in projects I have worked on, we have both a year range (year only) and an exact date for those works where we have a date. The date range search is done on the year only. If anyone has better ideas please shout!
(Of course software could be clever, but we have to exchange data too, so can't rely on technical wizardry in one system only. )
Sarah
Sarah
On 12 Dec 2013, at 18:45, Richard Light wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I was encouraged by the release of the Tate artist and artwork data to see what I could do with it from a Linked Data perspective. You can see the results at [1] (assuming that my home machine can cope). I don't claim that the site is pretty, but it does have some useful functionality, e.g. "born on this day", map, timeline, outward links. The main purpose of this post is to start a conversation about what counts as useful information when it comes to data sharing.
>
> The actual downloads provided by Tate (CSV files) were perfectly usable; it didn't take me long to convert them to XML and load them into My Favourite Database. However, I found that the information was a bit "thin" - e.g. places of birth and death are "place name, country" and dates are year-only. I used a "web termlist" to consult Geonames, and particularly for US places there could be as many as 100 places to choose from. So I was often reduced to running a web search for the artist in question, in order to know which place to pick. In a parallel exercise, I queried dbpedia for the artist's name, and picked potential matches by matching on birth and death dates. This hasn't been an exact science, and there may well still be links to entirely spurious dbpedia entries in the data. However, where it works I have usually benefitted by getting d.m.y dates from the dbpedia data, which I could then merge into my main artist file.
>
> Having exact dates allows me to add the "on this day ..." feature. Linking places to Geonames identifiers gives me access to lat/long coordinates, which in turn supports the map view. (Don't try the map/timeline view until you have run a search. It /will /attempt to display "pins" for all 3,527 artists, but it will never get there. :-) )
>
> In the single-record view (which you also have to wait for), I can use the Tate's built-in linking to reliably retrieve artworks by that artist, but when I attempt to bring in works from Culture Grid I have to use a speculative search based on the artist's name. The results will clearly be variable. Ah, if only there were some Unified List of Artists' Names, used in everyone's data, which one could call upon to improve cross-collection linking ...
>
> The single-record view also exploits the dbpedia links, where they exist. As well as the summary, it provides a list of artists who have influenced or been influenced by the artist in question. These are just boring links in my site, but I could equally have looked up these records and brought back some details about the people in question. I also attempt a SPARQL query on the dbpedia data, and list some people born in the same place as the artist. Unfortunately this uses all place keywords, including country, and so the results aren't particularly enlightening. However, it does point up what could be achieved with better, more domain-specific, data to query (e.g. in ResearchSpace?).
>
> Which brings me to the main point of the exercise, which was to assign dereferenceable Linked Data identifiers to each artist, so they can be referenced unambiguously. A typical example is [2], which does all the right Cool URIs things, and delivers HTML, XML and RDF if asked nicely. If you follow the top link from the detail page, you will arrive at the RDF variant [4] of that Linked Data.
>
> In conclusion, I think we need URLs to express information about our domain: cultural heritage. For some of these we can use generic services like Geonames, but for many aspects we will need to mint and /share/ URL frameworks which are specific to our requirements as a community.
>
> Richard
>
> [1] http://light.demon.co.uk/wordpress/?page_id=699
> [2] http://light.demon.co.uk/Person/tate-artists/id/1678
> [3] http://www.w3.org/TR/cooluris/
> [4] http://light.demon.co.uk/Person/tate-artists/id/rdf/1678
> --
> *Richard Light*
>
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