In February, I gave a presentation at the Wikibase Working Hour about how my VanderBot tool for uploading data to Wikidata could be used more broadly with any kind of wikibase. One example I gave was using it to upload Structured Data on Commons (SDoC) statements that describe what is depicted in a media file, since SDoC is just another wikibase instance.
Structured Data in Commons and wikibase software tools
All Divinity Publications in Wikidata
Vanderbilt Libraries Wikimedians have achieved another milestone by completing the upload of all publications of the 41 faculty in the Divinity School to Wikidata. This includes over 2800 scholarly works including books, book chapters, journal articles, and encyclopedia entries. Achieving this level of completeness for an entire academic unit at a major university is unusual.
Uploading a thousand Gallery images to Commons
I recently finished work on CommonsTool, a Python script to upload artwork images to Wikimedia Commons. In addition to uploading the image files, it creates Structured Data on Commons claims to provide machine-readable metadata about the images and to link them to Wikidata items that describe the underlying artwork objects. It also uploads the images to the Vanderbilt Libraries’ International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) server and generates IIIF manifests to display those images in a IIIF viewer.
Making SPARQL queries to Wikidata using Python
I recently solved several annoying problems that I’d been having when using SPARQL queries to acquire data from Wikidata. My success inspired me to write a comprehensive Python class that will reliably carry out every kind of SPARQL Query and Update, with defaults to easily make SELECT queries to Wikidata.
Birding in Puerto Rico
After recently making a trip to Puerto Rico that was primarily focused on bird watching, I decided to write a blog post to pass on some of what we learned. Much of the information that we got from books or the Internet was outdated or incorrect, so hopefully this post will help others to have an easier time finding good places to bird there.
Latest Posts
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.