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 Much of the information that we got from books or the Internet was outdated or incorrect, so hopefully this post will help others to have an easier time finding good places to bird there.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
Enabling ecological survey data integration
Our paper describing the Humboldt Extension to Darwin Core has been published in Ecography. The Humboldt Extension adds 55 terms that enrich the Darwin Core, providing the terms needed to capture and share multiple types of biodiversity survey data. The paper illustrates the benefits of implementing the Humboldt Extension with three case studies and demonstrates how richer data can be used in research, modelling, and to inform decision-making.
Biological survey and monitoring data publishing guide
My coauthors and I have published a guide to help people understand how to use the new Humboldt Extension for Biological Inventories of the Darwin Core standard. The guide includes diagrams and detailed information about how to structure the data to capture the hierarchical structure typically found in monitoring projects.
Open Science recipes published
My colleage from the Vanderbilt Libraries’ Digital Lab, Shenmeng Xu, an I have published two chapters in the ACRL’s 2025 Open Science Cookbook. The Cookbook is a lighthearted take on technical topics where instructions are given in “recipe” format to teach beginners new tech skills.