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
1616 Johann Erasmus Kindermann born in Nuremberg No Wikidata Item
1747 Johann Wilhelm Hässler born in Erfurt Wikidata Item
1817 Konstantin Aksakov born in Buguruslanskiy Rayon Wikidata Item
1847 Winfield S. Weeden born in Middleport Wikidata Item
1849 Cornelie Meysenheym born in The Hague No Wikidata Item
1850 Emma Louise Ashford born in Newark Wikidata Item
1859 Herman Bemberg born in Paris Wikidata Item
1862 Carl Busch born in Bjerre No Wikidata Item
1862 William J. Guard born in Limerick Wikidata Item
1865 Frederic Stewart Isham born in Detroit Wikidata Item
1878 Albert Von Tilzer born in Indianapolis Wikidata Item
1880 Rosina Lhévinne born in Kyiv Wikidata Item
1889 Pierre Vellones born in Paris Wikidata Item
1896 D. A. (David Abraham) Jessurun Cardozo born in Amsterdam Wikidata Item
1897 Harvey O'Connor born in Minneapolis Wikidata Item
1902 William Walton born in Oldham Wikidata Item
1905 Mantovani born in Venice Wikidata Item
1906 E. Power Biggs born in Westcliff Wikidata Item
1912 Ðorde Karaklajic born in Užice Wikidata Item
1914 Phil Foster born in Brooklyn Wikidata Item
1918 Margery Mayer born in Chicago No Wikidata Item
1918 Pearl Bailey born in Southampton Wikidata Item
1923 Remo Palmier born in Bronx Wikidata Item
1923 Bob Haymes born in White Plains No Wikidata Item
1924 Andrew Frierson born in Columbia Wikidata Item
1926 Frank Pooler born in Onalaska Wikidata Item
1927 Eugene Bianco born in Hartford Wikidata Item
1927 Teresa Sterne born in New York Wikidata Item
1928 Václav Felix born in Prague No Wikidata Item
1936 Richard Rodney Bennett born in Broadstairs Wikidata Item
1938 William A. Brown born in Jackson Wikidata Item
1940 Astrud Gilberto born in Salvador Wikidata Item
1943 Vangelis born in Agriá Wikidata Item
1943 Eric Idle born in South Shields No Wikidata Item
1947 Aage Kvalbein born in Oslo Wikidata Item
1948 Bud Cort born in New Rochelle Wikidata Item
1949 Harri Wessman born in Helsinki Wikidata Item
1949 Carl Randall born in Hollywood Wikidata Item
1949 Michael Brecker born in Philadelphia Wikidata Item
1959 Perry Farrell born in Borough of Queens Wikidata Item
1960 Chano Domínguez born in Cadiz Wikidata Item
1961 Amy Powers born in Bethpage Wikidata Item
1964 Apostolos Paraskévas born in Volos Wikidata Item
1965 Danilo Guanais born in São Paulo No Wikidata Item
1965 Jenni Muldaur born in Boston Wikidata Item
1967 John Popper born in Cleveland Wikidata Item
1969 Eliot Kennedy born in England Wikidata Item
1980 Chris D'Elia born in Montclair Wikidata Item
1980 Prince Hamzah bin Al Hussein born in Amman Wikidata Item
1981 Megan Hilty born in Bellevue Wikidata Item
1986 Sebastian Böhlen born in Schweinfurt Wikidata Item
1989 Michelle Zauner born in Seoul 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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