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
1784 Jacopo Ferretti born in Rome Wikidata Item
1822 Luigi Arditi born in Crescentino Wikidata Item
1830 Robert Roy Paterson born in Edinburgh No Wikidata Item
1832 Camille Du Locle born in Orange Wikidata Item
1849 B. F. (Benjamin Franklin) Riley born in Pineville Wikidata Item
1858 Eugène Ysaÿe born in Liège Wikidata Item
1861 Franz von Blon born in Berlin Wikidata Item
1863 Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler born in Bielice Wikidata Item
1867 Theodore Drury born in Bloomfield Wikidata Item
1872 Roald Amundsen born in Borge Wikidata Item
1890 Juozas Karosas born in Anykščiai District Municipality Wikidata Item
1891 Blossom Seeley born in San Francisco Wikidata Item
1892 Frank Crosswaith born in Frederiksted Wikidata Item
1893 Norah Blaney born in Fulham Wikidata Item
1896 Trygve Lie born in Oslo Wikidata Item
1901 Fritz Mahler born in Vienna Wikidata Item
1904 Goffredo Petrassi born in Zagarolo Wikidata Item
1904 Mabel Wayne born in Brooklyn Wikidata Item
1915 Joe O'Brien born in Yonkers No Wikidata Item
1916 Zadel Skolovsky born in Vancouver Wikidata Item
1919 Harold Rubens born in Cardiff Wikidata Item
1922 Bugs Bower born in Atlantic City Wikidata Item
1923 Bola Sete born in Rio de Janeiro Wikidata Item
1924 Raymond Alonge born in New York Wikidata Item
1924 Bess Myerson born in Bronx Wikidata Item
1925 Joe Lynch born in Mallow Wikidata Item
1925 Nat Pierce born in Somerville Wikidata Item
1925 Cal Tjader born in St Louis Wikidata Item
1926 Nannette Levi born in San Francisco No Wikidata Item
1927 David Wells born in East Chicago No Wikidata Item
1927 Miriam LaVelle born in Chester No Wikidata Item
1928 Andrey Dementyev born in Tver' Wikidata Item
1928 Patricia Wilde born in Ottawa Wikidata Item
1929 Carmelo Bernaola born in Otxandio Wikidata Item
1929 Francis Bebey born in Douala Wikidata Item
1930 John Watts born in Maryville Wikidata Item
1937 Charles Brady born in Delano No Wikidata Item
1938 Thorkell Sigurbjörnsson born in Reykjavik Wikidata Item
1939 Fredric Myrow born in Brooklyn Wikidata Item
1940 Arthur Moreira Lima born in Rio de Janeiro Wikidata Item
1941 Marcello Marrocchi born in Veroli Wikidata Item
1946 Dave Goelz born in Los Angeles Wikidata Item
1947 Linda Hogan born in Denver Wikidata Item
1948 Pinchas Zukerman born in Tel Aviv Wikidata Item
1948 Rubén Blades born in Panama City Wikidata Item
1949 Takashi Matsumoto born in Minamiaoyama Wikidata Item
1950 Camille Saviola born in Bronx Wikidata Item
1951 Bobby Previte born in Niagara Falls Wikidata Item
1954 Julie Lyonn Lieberman born in Newark Wikidata Item
1956 Tony Kushner born in New York Wikidata Item
1958 Michael Flatley born in Chicago Wikidata Item
1959 James MacMillan born in Kilwinning Wikidata Item
1960 Dawn Upshaw born in Nashville Wikidata Item
1961 Emmanuel Séjourné born in Limoges Wikidata Item
1982 Eric Jacobsen born in United States No Wikidata Item
1984 Thibault Cauvin born in Bordeaux 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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