Experiments


Whose Birthday is Today?

chdl-0001-c

See performers and composers from Carnegie Hall’s performance history who were born on this day. Click on each name to view information on that person from our online Performance History Search, and view matching items in Wikidata.

read lab report return to experiments

Birth Year Name with PHS Link Birth Place Matching Wikidata Item
1684 Francesco Onofrio Manfredini born in Pistoia Wikidata Item
1763 Etienne-Nicolas Méhul born in Givet Wikidata Item
1805 Giuseppe Mazzini born in Genoa Wikidata Item
1805 Ida, Countess von Hahn-Hahn born in Tressow Wikidata Item
1830 Theodor Leschetizky born in Łańcut Wikidata Item
1844 Margaret Sidney born in New Haven Wikidata Item
1856 H. Rider Haggard born in Bradenham Wikidata Item
1859 Frank Damrosch born in Wroclaw Wikidata Item
1869 Caroline O'Day born in Perry Wikidata Item
1876 Raymond Lee Ditmars born in Newark Wikidata Item
1878 Vincent P. Bryan born in St. John's Wikidata Item
1892 Max Zweig born in Prostějov Wikidata Item
1892 Emil Telmányi born in Arad Wikidata Item
1900 Pablo Escobar born in San José de los Arroyos No Wikidata Item
1900 Werner Danckert born in Erfurt Wikidata Item
1900 Jennie Tourel born in Vitebsk Wikidata Item
1900 Charlotte Boerner born in Leipzig No Wikidata Item
1901 Luis Rivera born in Monte Cristo Wikidata Item
1902 Lucie de Vienne born in Paris Wikidata Item
1907 Leibele Waldman born in New York Wikidata Item
1909 Katherine Dunham born in Chicago Wikidata Item
1909 Milton Kaye born in Brooklyn Wikidata Item
1910 Axel von Ambesser born in Hamburg Wikidata Item
1910 Peter Pears born in Farnham Wikidata Item
1911 Harvey Shapiro born in New York Wikidata Item
1914 Gino Gorini born in Venice Wikidata Item
1916 Richard Eastham born in Opelousas Wikidata Item
1917 Jean Hubeau born in Paris Wikidata Item
1921 Joseph Papp born in Brooklyn Wikidata Item
1922 Madeline Foley born in New York No Wikidata Item
1924 Robert Pace born in Newton Wikidata Item
1930 Paul Jacobs born in New York Wikidata Item
1931 Dean Diggins born in Hampton No Wikidata Item
1932 Michael M. Horvit born in Brooklyn Wikidata Item
1934 Ray Mantilla born in New York Wikidata Item
1936 Hermeto Pascoal born in Lagoa da Canoa Wikidata Item
1936 Vern Shinall born in St Louis No Wikidata Item
1936 Kris Kristofferson born in Brownsville Wikidata Item
1942 Eumir Deodato born in Rio de Janeiro Wikidata Item
1943 Steve Weber born in Philadelphia Wikidata Item
1943 Harvey Pittel born in Great Falls Wikidata Item
1944 Peter Asher born in London Wikidata Item
1946 Eliades Ochoa born in Songo - La Maya Wikidata Item
1947 Bob Becker born in Allentown Wikidata Item
1947 Howard Kaylan born in New York Wikidata Item
1948 Todd Rundgren born in Upper Darby Wikidata Item
1949 Meryl Streep born in Summit Wikidata Item
1951 Gerald Levinson born in New Hyde Park Wikidata Item
1953 Cyndi Lauper born in Woodhaven Wikidata Item
1955 Jeffrey Mumford born in Washington Wikidata Item
1960 Olesandr Shchetynsky born in Kharkiv Wikidata Item
1960 Ilton Wjuniski born in São Paulo Wikidata Item
1960 Arturo O'Farrill born in Mexico City Wikidata Item
1963 Paul Basler born in Milwaukee Wikidata Item
1964 Angelo Tsarouchas born in Montreal Wikidata Item
1966 Kazuyoshi Saito born in Mibu Wikidata Item
1966 Rodrick Dixon born in Borough of Queens No Wikidata Item
1978 Tosin Aribisala born in Ibadan Wikidata Item
1984 Stephanie Mabey born in Salt Lake City No Wikidata Item
1987 Ammar Malik born in Virginia Wikidata Item

lab report


EXPERIMENT LABEL/TITLE

List: Whose Birthday is Today?

TL;DR

See which composers and performers from Carnegie Hall’s performance history were born on this day, with their birth year, birthplace, and a link to their corresponding Wikidata item.


The scope is limited to those people for whom we have birthdate and birthplace information.

METHODS

We created a SPARQL query using data.carnegiehall.org, which finds people from Carnegie Hall's performance history (e.g. performers, and/or creators like composers, arrangers, lyricists, etc.) born on today's date. Since birthdates have been stored as ISO-8601 dates assigned datatypes like xsd:date (YYYY-MM-DD), xsd:gYearMonth (YYYY-MM), or xsd:gYear (YYYY), we can use SPARQL's FILTER to find only those people born on today's month and day. Birthplaces are identified using GeoNames URIs (when the birth city is not known, birth country will be used; people with no birthplace recorded will not appear in the query). The query will also return the Wikidata item ID for anyone whose Carnegie Hall ID has been aligned with Wikidata using the skos:exactMatch property.


              PREFIX rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>
              PREFIX schema: <http://schema.org/##>
              PREFIX geo-pos: <http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos##>
              PREFIX skos: <http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core##>
              SELECT ?personName ?birthPlace ?birthPlaceLabel ?lat ?long ?opasID ?wikidataLink (YEAR(?date) as ?year)
              (IRI(CONCAT("https://www.carnegiehall.org/About/History/Performance-History-Search?q=&dex=prod_PHS&pf=",
                            (STR(ENCODE_FOR_URI(?personName))))) AS ?perfLink)
              (IRI(CONCAT("https://www.carnegiehall.org/About/History/Performance-History-Search?q=&dex=prod_PHS&cmp=",
                            (STR(ENCODE_FOR_URI(?personName))))) AS ?compLink)
              WHERE
              {
                  BIND(MONTH(NOW()) AS ?nowMonth)
                  BIND(DAY(NOW()) AS ?nowDay)

                  ?personID schema:birthDate ?date ;
                          schema:name ?personName ;
                          schema:birthPlace ?birthPlace .
                  ?birthPlace rdfs:label ?birthPlaceLabel ;
                              geo-pos:lat ?lat ;
                              geo-pos:long ?long .
                  OPTIONAL { ?personID skos:exactMatch ?wikidataLink .
                      filter contains(str(?wikidataLink), "wikidata")}
                  BIND(REPLACE(str(?personID), "http://data.carnegiehall.org/names/", "") as ?opasID)
                  FILTER (MONTH(?date) = ?nowMonth && DAY(?date) = ?nowDay)

              }
              ORDER BY ?year
              LIMIT 100
            

In order to provide an easily human-readable version of each person’s history at the hall, we also use SPARQL to create a link to Performance History Search, an HTML presentation of essentially the same dataset that we published first in 2013 (and predates our experiments with LOD). (In the query, this is found right after the SELECT statement, where you'll see (IRI(CONCAT( etc.)

CONCLUSIONS

what we learned

You might be asking why we need to formulate different versions of the PHS link. The HTML version launched in 2013, well prior to our release of the same data as RDF in 2017; although the source database is the same, the process that translates the data for display is a bit different and was developed separately. This creates a few challenges when attempting to create links to PHS search filters:

  • Our source database for CH’s performance history data, a proprietary SQL-based product designed for concert planning, stores performers and composers in separate tables. When the data is surfaced in the HTML Performance History Search (PHS), that separation between composers and performers remains. Query filters are constructed from a search index based on the name string of the composer or performer.
  • Our RDF version of the data solves this problem of (potential) dual IDs by creating a single ID for each named entity, with statements defining their role according to associations with creative works (as a composer, arranger, lyricist, etc.) and/or events (as a performer).
  • In order to construct the PHS link, a URL-safe version of the Wikidata item label (i.e. the name of the composer or performer, with URL-encoded characters replacing spaces and other reserved characters) must be concatenated with a base URL, e.g. https://www.carnegiehall.org/About/History/Performance-History-Search?q=&dex=prod_PHS&pf=Juan%20Tizol.

further investigation

Eventually our goal is to bring all online historical content — our performance history and digital collections — into a single, unified user experience using our LOD as the metadata "backbone". The Carnegie Hall Data Lab is a first step in that direction, where we can begin experimenting with user-friendly ways to surface our performance history data.


return to experiments