News

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.

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.

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 Much of the information that we got from books or the Internet was outdated or incorrect, so hopefully this post will help others to have an easier time finding good places to bird there.

I’m really excited to be working with Vanderbilt Science and Engineering librarian Francisco Juarez to develop a workshop series to teach participants to program the QT Py RP2040 microcontroller using CircuitPython.

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.