Proposal for a Play session: SPARQL-ing WIKIDATA

Session by Pim van Bree & Geert Kessels.

In this session we plan to continue on the session proposed by Claartje Rasterhoff and Auke Rijpma.

The inspiration for this session comes from this topic on the nodegoat forum where the OP states: “Graph databases and SPARQL are useless unless you […] have several weeks of time to spare […]”. Even though it is true that using graph databases and SPARQL is far from straightforward, we will together go step by step from this empty query box to get a list of people with a noble title, who were born after 1700, who have the occupation ‘writer’, who are female, and died in a city in Austria.

The aim is to show how statements on one object can help you to guide you through the data in the database.  Once you get a feeling for this (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻, it is easy to establish a body of data that can be used to analyse and visualise data (like: a visualisation of all the members of the US House of Representatives, or a map of historical battles) or to get a body of data that can be used as context for a research question.

You can also make use the identifiers provided by large datasets in your own dataset to be able to link and sync your data with the wider world.

Ingeborg van Vugt will talk about how she uses the STCN-dataset to enrich her own research by analysing and comparing records.