Our family loves to visit U.S. national parks and we have visited most of the ones that are easy to get to. We had pretty much written off going to Isle Royale due to its remoteness and the difficulty of getting there. However, our daughter did some research on what it would take to get there and we decided to give it a try. In this post, I will share some information we gained about making the…
After finishing reading all of the Hugo Award winners for best novel, I decided to keep up the momentum and read all of the winners of the Nebula Award for best novel. I just finished the last one yesterday and decided to write a follow-up post to my earlier one where I talked about which of the Hugo books were my favorites . In this post, I’ll discuss the Nebula winners that were not also Hugo…
In May 2023, I completed a quest that was on my bucket list: reading all of the winners of the Hugo Award for best science fiction/fantasy novel. At that time, there were 71 books on the list (not counting “Retro-Hugo” winners). I’m not sure when I read my first one – the first one that I can unambiguously remember reading was Dune in about 1975 or 76. I read a number of the winners from the 70’s…
James H. Bassett, “Okapi,” Bassett Associates Archive , accessed August 5, 2023, https://bassettassociates.org/archive/items/show/337 . Available under a CC BY 4.0 license . Several years ago, I was given access to the digital files of Bassett Associates, a landscape architectural firm that operated for over 60 years in Lima, Ohio. This award-winning firm, which disbanded in 2017, was well known…
In my last blog post , I described a tool ( CommonsTool ) that I created for uploading art images to Wikimedia Commons. One of the features of that Python script was to create Structured Data in Commons (SDoC) statements about the artwork that was being uploaded, such as "depicts" (P180) and "main subject" (P921) and "digital representation of" (P6243), necessary to "magically" populate the…
A Ghost Painting Coming to Life in the Studio of the Painter Okyō, from the series Yoshitoshi ryakuga (Sketches by Yoshitoshi). 1882 print by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi. Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery 1992.083 via Wikimedia Commons . Wikidata item Q102961245 For several years, I've been working with the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery staff to create and improve Wikidata items for the approximately…
"Welding sparkles" by Dhivya dhivi DJ, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons Background This is actually a sort of followup post to my most popular blog post: " Getting Data Out of Wikidata using Software ", which has had about 6.5K views since 2019. That post was focused on the variety of query forms you could use and talked a lot about using Javascript to build web pages that acquired data from…
Pearly-eyed Thrasher - Bosque Estatal de Guánica, Puerto Rico NOTE: this information was accurate as of our trip in mid-March of 2022. It will undoubtedly change as time goes by. Having just completed a week-long vacation in Puerto Rico focused primarily on bird-watching, I wanted to share some observations that might be helpful for others planning to do the same. Please note that we aren't top…
Introduction Those of you who know me know that I like to play somewhat complicated games. One of the reasons I enjoy that is the challenge of figuring out how the game works and how I might play the game better by using my understanding to develop rules of thumb for making decisions during the game. I also enjoy writing Python scripts when I've found an interesting problem to solve. In this…
This is the fourth part of a series of posts intended to help you manage and upload data to Wikidata using spreadsheets. It assumes that you have already read the first three posts and that you have tried the "do it yourself" experiments to get a better understanding of how the system works. However, it's possible that the only thing that you want to do is to download data from Wikidata into a…
This is the third part of a series of posts intended to help you manage and upload data to Wikidata using spreadsheets. You probably won't get as much out of this post if you haven't already done the do-it-yourself exercises in the first two posts, but since this is a more general topic, you might still find it useful even if you haven't read the earlier ones. Determining scope The target audience…
For a video walk-through of the previous blog post and this one, see this page . In the previous post , I described how to create a Wikimedia bot password and use it to write spreadsheet data to the test Wikidata instance: https://test.wikidata.org/ . The process required setting up a JSON metadata description file that mapped the CSV column headers to the RDF variant of the Wikibase data model.…
Warning: this blog post involves extreme hand-holding. If that irritates you and you want to try to figure out how to use VanderBot on your own without hand-holding, you can go straight to the VanderBot landing page and look at the very abbreviated instructions there. However, make sure that you understand your responsibilities as a Wikidata user. If they are unclear to you, read the…
Photo from W3C https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html TDWG IRIs are dereferenceable with content negotiation! Yesterday was a happy day for me because after several years of work, the switch was flipped and all of the IRIs minted by TDWG under the rs.tdwg.org subdomain became dereferenceable with content negotiation in most cases. For those readers who aren't hard-core Linked Open Data…
In the previous blog post , I described how I used a Python script to upload data stored in a CSV spreadsheet to Wikidata via the Wikidata API. I noted that the spreadsheet contained information about whether data were already in Wikidata and if they needed to be written to the API, but I did not say how I acquired those data, nor how I determined whether they needed to be uploaded or not. That…
In the previous post of this series , I described how my investigation of the Wikibase data model led me to settle on a relatively simple spreadsheet layout for tracking what items, statements, and references needed to be created or edited in Wikidata. Since column headers in a CSV spreadsheet don't really have any meaning other than to a human, it's necessary to map columns to features of the…
The Wikidata GUI and the Wikibase model To read part 1 of this series, see this page . If you've edited Wikidata using the human-friendly graphical user interface (GUI), you know that items can have multiple properties, each property can have multiple values, each property/value statement can be qualified in multiple ways, each property/value statement can have multiple references, and each…
Note added 2021-03-13: Although this post is still relevant for understanding the conceptual ideas behind my project to write Vanderbilt researcher/scholar records to Wikidata, I have written another series of blog posts showing (with lots of screenshots and handholding) how you can safely write your own data to the Wikidata API using data that is stored in simple CSV spreadsheets. See this post…
This is the sixth and final post in a series on the TDWG Standards Documentation Specification (SDS). The five earlier posts explain the history and model of the SDS, and how to retrieve the machine-readable metadata about TDWG standards. Note: this post was revised on 2020-03-04 when IRI dereferencing of the http://rs.tdwg.org/ subdomain went from testing into production. Where do standards data…
This post is very focused on the details of two Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG) standards as they relate to Linked Data and graph models. If you are generally interested in approaches to Linked Data graph modeling, you might find it interesting. Otherwise, if you aren't into TDWG standards, you may zone out. Background The TDWG Darwin Core and Access to Biological Collection Data (ABCD)…
This is a followup post to an earlier post about getting data out of Wikidata , so although what I'm writing about here doesn't really depend on having read that post, you might want to take a look at it for background. Note added 2021-03-13: Although this post is still relevant for understanding some of the basic ideas about writing to a Wikibase API (including Wikidata's), I have written another…
For those of you who have been struggling through my series of posts on the TDWG Standards Documentation Specification, you may be happy to read a more "fun" post on everybody's current darling: Wikidata. This post has a lot of "try it yourself" activities, so if you have an installation of Python on your computer, you can try running the scripts yourself. 2022-06-11 note: a more recent followup…
This is the fifth in a series of posts about the TDWG Standards Documentation Specification (SDS). For background on the SDS, see the first post . For information on the SDS hierarchical model and how it relates to IRI design, see the second post . For information about how TDWG standards metadata can be retrieved via IRI dereferencing, see the third post . For information about accessing TDWG…
This is the fourth in a series of posts about the TDWG Standards Documentation Specification (SDS). For background on the SDS, see the first post . For information on its hierarchical model and how it relates to IRI design, see the second post . For information about how metadata is retrieved via IRI dereferencing, see the third post . Note: this post was revised on 2020-03-04 when IRI…
This is the third in a series of posts about the TDWG Standards Documentation Specification (SDS). For background on the SDS, see the first post . For information on its hierarchical model and how it relates to IRI design, see the second post . Note: this post was revised on 2020-03-04 when IRI dereferencing of the http://rs.tdwg.org/ subdomain went from testing into production. Human- vs.…