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.

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Birth Year Name with PHS Link Birth Place Matching Wikidata Item
1768 Francesco Molino born in Ivrea Wikidata Item
1770 James Hewitt born in England Wikidata Item
1789 Anton Halm born in Sankt Josef (Weststeiermark) Wikidata Item
1821 Apollon Maykov born in Moscow Wikidata Item
1870 Cesare Galeotti born in Pietrasanta Wikidata Item
1876 Harmony Twichell Ives born in Hartford No Wikidata Item
1882 Erwin Lendvai born in Budapest Wikidata Item
1891 Erno Rapee born in Budapest Wikidata Item
1895 Bjarne Brustad born in Oslo Wikidata Item
1900 Alfredo Le Pera born in São Paulo Wikidata Item
1900 Nelson Glueck born in Cincinnati Wikidata Item
1905 José Echániz born in Guanabacoa Wikidata Item
1907 Marjan Kozina born in Novo Mesto Wikidata Item
1907 Rosalind Russell born in Waterbury Wikidata Item
1909 Paul Nordoff born in Philadelphia Wikidata Item
1912 Pilar López born in Donostia / San Sebastian Wikidata Item
1913 Bruno Bettinelli born in Milan Wikidata Item
1914 Everett Gates born in Des Moines No Wikidata Item
1917 Robert Merrill born in Brooklyn Wikidata Item
1918 Noel Estrada born in Isabela Wikidata Item
1918 Manuel Gayol born in San Juan No Wikidata Item
1920 Fedora Barbieri born in Trieste Wikidata Item
1922 Irwin Bazelon born in Evanston Wikidata Item
1925 Nicomedes Santa Cruz born in La Victoria Wikidata Item
1928 Tonin Harapi born in Shkodër Wikidata Item
1928 Teddy Kotick born in Haverhill Wikidata Item
1928 Ruth Westheimer born in Wiesenfeld Wikidata Item
1928 Milan Škampa born in Prague Wikidata Item
1930 Alfred Prinz born in Vienna Wikidata Item
1930 Morgana King born in Pleasantville Wikidata Item
1931 Young-ja Lee born in Wŏnju-sich’ŏng Wikidata Item
1932 Oliver Nelson born in St Louis Wikidata Item
1935 Colette Boky born in Montreal Wikidata Item
1937 Freddy Fender born in San Benito Wikidata Item
1937 H. M. Koutoukas born in Endicott Wikidata Item
1939 John Oliver born in Teaneck No Wikidata Item
1940 Dorothy Rudd Moore born in New Castle Wikidata Item
1943 Ted Daniel born in Ossining Wikidata Item
1944 Roger Ball born in Broughty Ferry Wikidata Item
1944 Michelle Phillips born in Long Beach Wikidata Item
1945 Anthony Braxton born in Chicago Wikidata Item
1948 Paquito D'Rivera born in Havana Wikidata Item
1952 Scott Wesley Brown born in Philadelphia Wikidata Item
1958 Tito Nieves born in Rio Piedras Wikidata Item
1960 Eduardo Gamboa born in Havana No Wikidata Item
1961 El DeBarge born in Detroit Wikidata Item
1961 Sam Harris born in Sand Springs Wikidata Item
1962 Winard Harper born in Baltimore Wikidata Item
1962 Paul Baloche born in Camden Wikidata Item
1966 Cecilia Bartoli born in Rome Wikidata Item
1967 Imke David born in Erlangen Wikidata Item
1969 Horatio Sanz born in Santiago Wikidata Item
1974 Julian Cochran born in Cambridge Wikidata Item
1983 Richie Barshay born in Southport 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.


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