Linked Open Data Archives - ross spencer :: exponentialdecay.digipres

Making DROID work with Wikidata

Wikidata is a good service, Wikibase (on which Wikidata is built) is a better platform.

I have spoken before about its potential to be added into the file-format registry ecosystem in a federated model.

If we are to use it as a registry that can perhaps complement the pipelines going into PRONOM, e.g. in vendor’s digital preservation platforms such as the Rosetta Format Library, a Wikidata should be able to output different serializations of signature file for tools such as Siegfried, DROID or FIDO.

Siegfried ✅: https://github.com/richardlehane/siegfried/wiki/Wikidata-identifier
Fido ❌: I’ll need to revisit this!

And what about DROID?

Using a custom Wikibase with Siegfried

In March I was invited by the LD4 Wikidata Affinity Group to talk about my experiences using Wikibase with Siegfried, the file format identification tool. I don’t think I’ve talked about that work on here before but you can find links to my iPRES talk on my ORCID page.

Let’s look at the abstract and the content of the talk below.

A photograph of a blue neon sign with a quote from Ludwig Wittgenstein's 'Philosophical Investigations: "276. “But don’t we at least mean something quite definite when we look at a color and name our color impression?” It is virtually as if we detached the color impression from the object, like a membrane. (This ought to arouse our suspicions.)"

Infinite Blue @ The Brooklyn Museum

When I visited the Brooklyn Museum in February they were in the middle of their Infinite Blue exhibition. Surveying the entire collection, Infinite Blue collected museum objects that prominently featured the color blue. Part of their Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum.

A Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism at the Brooklyn Museum presents the history of feminism and feminist art while showcasing contemporary artistic practices and new thought leadership.

While not explicitly stated in their literature, Blue seems to have been selected by the museum’s curators for embodying core feminist values:

In cultures dating back thousands of years, blue—the color of the skies—has often been associated with the spiritual but also signifies power, status, and beauty. The spiritual and material aspects of blue combine to tell us stories about global history, cultural values, technological innovation, and international commerce.

The Painter Goblin: Part 5, And Finally…

The work on the Painter Goblin is almost complete for now. The automation of their work is pretty much ironed out with regular tweets happening every night.

A recent favorite:

Maria Krzymuska — Wikidata: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q28727544

I just wanted to round off this series of blogs with some remaining thoughts.

The Painter Goblin: Part 3, Data Sources

One thing that held the Painter Goblin project back was finding a data source to get images from.

There are potentially hundreds of sources out there, but! The path of least resistance means that:

Any source needs either hackable URIs** (uniform resource identifier) or a randomizing function.
Ideally, a data source doesn’t link to yet-another-page, e.g. portal like websites to other’s collections.
Ideally the data source links directly to an image to download.
Data can be easily selected by category, e.g. just paintings, or posters, not just ‘art’.

** A hackable URI is a URI pattern that can be cycled through using computational techniques, even if the underlying data isn’t entirely well-known. E,g, http://example.com/image/0001, http://example.com/image/0002, for subsequent pages, for lack of a more concrete example.

I wanted to explore heritage sources such as Europeana, TROVE, DPLA. I struggled to search these effectively though, and struggled to see how I might automate using them. I recognise they have APIs. I’ll revisit them in the future as I look to expand the Painter Goblin’s corpus.

Enter Wikidata.

Architecture of The-FR.org

Last week I blogged about the publication of a new linked data format registry based on the work I did previously at The National Archives, UK.

Where the work goes, we will have to see. Open sourcing it was an important goal of the short sprint. Partly because I hope it demonstrates an architecture that can be adopted for a similar registry, and it may also provide a code-base that can be adapted for similar, linked open data projects. This blog provides an overview of that architecture…

the-fr.org :: The Format Registry

As the story goes, I got home last Thursday. 14 November, 2013; A tweet from the previous day, still on…

Category: Linked Open Data

Making DROID work with Wikidata

Using a custom Wikibase with Siegfried

Infinite Blue @ The Brooklyn Museum

The Painter Goblin: Part 5, And Finally…

The Painter Goblin: Part 3, Data Sources

Architecture of The-FR.org

the-fr.org :: The Format Registry

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