In an October 14th article in the New Yorker about the use of Artificial Intelligence to generate prose, John Seabrook wrote: “A recent exhibition on the written word at the British Library dates the emergence of cuneiform writing to the fourth millennium B.C.E., in Mesopotamia”. That got me thinking about some notes I once took on the early history of metadata, and I wondered if there was any scholarship to show that the earliest metadata is as old as the earliest writing. Not…

Have you ever written a SPARQL query that returned a suspiciously large amount of results, especially with too many combinations of values? You may have accidentally requested a cross product. I have spent too much time debugging queries where this turned out to be the problem, so I wanted to talk about avoiding it.

I’ve been thinking about which machine learning tools can contribute the most to the field of digital humanities, and an obvious candidate is document embeddings. I’ll describe what these are below but I’ll start with the fun part: after using some document embedding Python scripts to compare the roughly 560 Wikibooks recipes to each other, I created an If you liked… web page that shows, for each recipe, what other recipes were calculated to be most similar to that…

When I was at TopQuadrant, I learned that their SPARQLMotion scripting language had a module that could convert JSON to RDF. This had nothing to do with JSON-LD—it worked with any JSON at all, using blank nodes to indicate the grouping of data within arbitrary structures.

In a recent Twitter exchange, Dr Joanne Paul asked “Does/can this exist? A website where I enter a title (eg. ’earl of pembroke’) and a year (eg. 1553) and it spits out who held that title in that year (in this case, William Herbert).” Michelle Watson replied “I bet you could probably write SPARQL query to Wikipedia that would come close to doing that. Not sure how you’d embed that into a webpage though.” I replied to that: “Have an HTML form that…

There is a reasonable chance that you’ve never heard of SQLite and are unaware that this database management program and many database files in its format may be stored on all of your computing devices. Firefox and Chrome in particular use it to keep track of your cookies and, as I’ve recently learned, many other things. Of course I want to query all that data with SPARQL, so I wrote some short simple scripts to convert these tables of data to Turtle.

OpenStreetMap, or “OSM” to geospatial folk, is a crowd-sourced online map that has made tremendous achievements in its role as the Wikipedia of geospatial data. (The Wikipedia page for OpenStreetMap is really worth a skim to learn more about its impressive history.) OSM offers a free alternative to commercial mapping systems out there—and you better believe that the commercial mapping systems are reading that great free data into their own databases.

Last month I wrote about how we can treat the growing amount of JSON-LD in the world as RDF. By “treat” I mean “query it with SPARQL and use it with the wide choice of RDF application development tools out there”. While I did demonstrate that JSON-LD does just fine with URIs from outside of the schema.org vocabulary, the vast majority of JSON-LD out there uses schema.org.