Wednesday, November 1, 2017

OpenRefine Reconciliation API for Kerameikos

Over the last few days, I developed and launched an OpenRefine reconciliation service for Nomisma.org. This service allows a user to clean up spreadsheets (whether for museum objects or personal research data) by reconciling columns of concepts (denominations, mints, people, etc.) against the concepts defined on Nomisma.

Since Kerameikos is built entirely from the same software architecture as Nomisma, I was able to copy and paste all of the associated Orbeon XML Pipeline files and XSLT stylesheets in order to deploy the same reconciliation service at http://kerameikos.org/apis/reconcile.

Like Nomisma, the service supports the main reconciliation API, the autosuggest feature for additional matches, and preview popups that will display the skos:prefLabel and skos:definition in a small HTML popup window.

Preview API


Entity suggestion API

This new feature necessitated the upgrade to the newest version of Orbeon Forms in order to support the processing of JSON in XSLT. These XML pipelines serve as an intermediary process between the OpenRefine API requests, Solr search queries, and the resulting JSON output.

With this new feature, it will be much easier and more efficient to normalize large quantities of Greek vase data against Kerameikos concepts, which will hopefully pave the way toward greater aggregation of data and facilitate more complete and accurate distribution and geographic visualizations.

We are beginning the process of reconciling the Beazley Archive's term lists against Wikidata entities and the Getty vocabularies in order to generate all of the distinct concepts for Greek pottery in Kerameikos. This new API will then facilitate the normalization of Beazley data against Kerameikos, enabling the data to come full circle through a cleaning process.