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
1795 Jean-François-Victor Bellon born in Lyon No Wikidata Item
1799 Ferdo Livadic born in Celje Wikidata Item
1836 Édouard Blau born in Blois Wikidata Item
1846 Riccardo Drigo born in Padua Wikidata Item
1873 Antoinette Funk born in Dwight Wikidata Item
1876 Joseph R. Hanley born in Davenport Wikidata Item
1879 Bryceson Treharne born in Merthyr Tydfil Wikidata Item
1882 Ludwig Lewisohn born in Berlin Wikidata Item
1883 Riccardo Zandonai born in Sacco Wikidata Item
1883 Clive Carey born in Sible Hedingham Wikidata Item
1886 James R. Gillette born in Roseboom No Wikidata Item
1888 James A. Farley born in Stony Point Wikidata Item
1890 Frank St. Leger born in Chennai Wikidata Item
1891 Ben Bernie born in Bayonne Wikidata Item
1901 Itzik Manger born in Chernivtsi Wikidata Item
1901 Frankie Trumbauer born in Carbondale Wikidata Item
1903 Alex J. Kramer born in Montreal Wikidata Item
1903 Countee Cullen born in United States Wikidata Item
1905 Sidney De Paris born in Crawfordsville Wikidata Item
1907 Lora Aborn born in New York Wikidata Item
1907 Stephen Kovacs born in Hungary No Wikidata Item
1909 Benny Goodman born in Chicago Wikidata Item
1913 Pee Wee Erwin born in Falls City Wikidata Item
1913 Kalman Bloch born in Harlem Wikidata Item
1920 George London born in Montreal Wikidata Item
1922 Betty Anne Mills born in Seattle No Wikidata Item
1923 Gloria Agostini born in Montreal Wikidata Item
1925 Judd Woldin born in Somerville Wikidata Item
1926 Mordechai Sheinkman born in Tel Aviv No Wikidata Item
1927 Elly Stone born in Brooklyn Wikidata Item
1928 Pyotr Londonov born in Sverdlovsk Oblast No Wikidata Item
1930 Dave McKenna born in Woonsocket Wikidata Item
1932 Pauline Oliveros born in Houston Wikidata Item
1935 Genevieve Chinn born in New York No Wikidata Item
1939 John Gordon born in New York Wikidata Item
1942 Lenny Davidson born in Enfield Wikidata Item
1943 Peter Lipa born in Prešov Wikidata Item
1948 Nelson González born in Vega Baja Wikidata Item
1951 René Staar born in Graz Wikidata Item
1952 Zoltán Kocsis born in Budapest Wikidata Item
1953 John Oswald born in Kitchener Wikidata Item
1953 Anne LeBaron born in Baton Rouge Wikidata Item
1958 Ann Hampton Callaway born in Chicago No Wikidata Item
1962 Tonya Pinkins born in Chicago Wikidata Item
1964 Wynonna Judd born in Ashland Wikidata Item
1971 Idina Menzel born in Borough of Queens Wikidata Item
1974 Nicholas Anthony Ascioti born in Syracuse No Wikidata Item
1974 CeeLo Green born in Atlanta Wikidata Item
1975 Ailish Tynan born in Mullingar 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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