VanderBot 1.9 supports somevalue

Published: Jan 17, 2022 by Steve Baskauf

One of the issues I discussed at my recent talk in the Art in Context: Identity, Ethics, and Insight symposium was the problem of representing anonymous artists in knowledge graphs. The solution that the Wikidata community has accepted is to associate a P170 (creator) claim with a somevalue snak having a P3831 (object has role) qualifier value of Q4233718 (anonymous). In RDF, this corresponds to a blank node and Wikidata claims using somevalue are represented by blank nodes in the Query Service.

This solution was a bit annoying, because the VanderBot script that I use to create items in Wikidata from data in CSV files could not generate somevalue claims. Since anonymous artists are important for two Vanderbilt Libraries Wikidata projects that I’m working on (WikiProject Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery and WikiProject Art in the Christian Tradition (ACT)), I spent some time last week updating the VanderBot Python script to be able to create somevalue claims. I also modified its companion script (used to download existing data) to record somevalue information in the same format used by VanderBot.

Using the new script, last Friday I was able to create about 100 new artwork items for the ACT project, many of which had anonymous artists.

For details of how to use the new feature, see the VanderBot user information page.

Humboldt Extension for Ecological Inventories Published

The Humboldt Extension for Ecological Inventories is a new metadata vocabulary that extends the Darwin Core Standard to make it possible to describe the inventories and sampling events that are used to collect organism occurrence data. This is the largest extension to Darwin Core since the original vocabulary was ratified in 2009 and it represents over three years of work by the Humboldt Extension Task Group. This group of international experts met weekly over that time period to develop the vocabulary, carry out implementation testing, and publish the vocabulary and associated documentation.

Camtrap DP paper published

Camera trapping is an increasingly important method used by ecologists for monitoring animals in the wild. Camera trap data has previously been difficult to publish by conventional means, since the data includes many related images or videos that must be associated with the occurrence data. The new Camtrap DP standard provides a way to package camera trap data based on the open Frictionless Data Package specification. Camtrap DP datasets can be easily exchanged or published to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) where the included occurrence data will be integrated with biodiversity data collected by other means.

Nine hundred images added to Wikimedia Commons from ACT

Charlotte Lew and I have been working for some time to improve access to images in the Art in the Christian Tradition database by linking descriptive metadata in Wikidata to the corresponding artwork images in Wikimedia Commons. In the first part of the project, we were primarily cleaning up and linking Wikidata metadata to images that were already in Commons.