Thursday, April 30, 2015

Kerameikos.org editor extended to support Getty ULAN linking

This morning, the Getty Museum announced the release of the Union List of Artist Names (ULAN) into their new linked open data publication system. As soon as I had a few minutes free, I updated the Getty SPARQL lookup mechanism in the Kerameikos.org editor to extend the XForms component for querying the ULAN to link painters and potters in Kerameikos to Getty URIs. The updates were pushed into production in less than five minutes.



Now that lookups to the Getty and British Museum SPARQL endpoints and the VIAF RSS feed are available for people, I was able to create the id for Kleitias in about a minute (having also extracted preferred labels from dbpedia).

For a bit more information about how this works under the hood:

If you are editing a foaf:Person concept, the link to the Getty ULAN lookup will appear under "Import" in the right sidebar. If a preferred label has already been empty, clicking the Getty ULAN link will automatically query with the provided preferred label, otherwise you can enter your own string. The query string is passed into an XForms instance containing the following SPARQL query:

PREFIX gvp: <http://vocab.getty.edu/ontology#>
PREFIX skos: <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#>
PREFIX luc: <http://www.ontotext.com/owlim/lucene#>
PREFIX ulan: <http://vocab.getty.edu/ulan/>
SELECT ?c ?label ?scopeNote WHERE {
?c a gvp:PersonConcept; skos:inScheme ulan: ;
gvp:prefLabelGVP/xl:literalForm ?label ;
skos:scopeNote/rdf:value ?scopeNote ;
luc:term "SEARCH_QUERY"} LIMIT 25


The luc:term is the property used to query a Lucene index. The query is sent to the Getty SPARQL endpoint via an XForms submission, and the XML response is then represented graphically as a table of results with checkboxes to include as skos:exactMatch. The checkboxes are not really necessary for the Getty lookup, as we can probably assume there is one URI per entity, but the mechanism is carried over from the VIAF lookup. VIAF has not fully disambiguated entities across all authority records.

2 comments:

  1. Nice! Why only PersonConcept, aren't orgs and workshops relevant to your case?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yeah, that are, but we haven't really finalized the org/workshop model and begun creating workshops, so I'll wait until we get that far before activating the ULAN lookup mechanism for workshops.

    ReplyDelete