For a long time I’ve thought that it would be fun to use SPARQL queries of Wikidata to create music playlists that can be played back. While researching last month’s blog entry Use SPARQL to query for movies, then watch them I learned about the P724 Internet Archive ID property, and that turned out to be an excellent hook for finding Wikidata audio recordings that we can listen to.

Sometimes a question pops into my head that, although unrelated to computers, could likely be answered with a SPARQL query. I don’t necessarily know the query off the top of my head and have to work it out. I’m going to discuss an example of one that I worked out and the steps that I took, because I wanted to show how I navigated the Wikidata data model to get what I wanted.

Last month in Populating a Schema.org dataset from Wikidata I talked about pulling data out of Wikidata and using it to create Schema.org triples, and I hinted about the possibility of updating Wikidata data directly. The SPARQL fun of this is to then perform queries against Wikidata and to see your data edits reflected within a few minutes. I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly edits showed up in query results, so I thought I would demo it with a little video.

As the Schema.org vocabulary gets applied to more and more data and the data in Wikidata grows and grows, it’s only natural to think about the possibilities of creating Schema.org datasets that are populated from Wikidata.

I recently tweeted “I find that @imdb is so crowded with ads that’s it’s easier to use Wikipedia to look up movies and actors and directors and their careers. And then there’s that Wikidata SPARQL endpoint!” Instead of just cursing the darkness, I decided to light a little SPARQL-Python-JavaScript candle, and it was remarkably easy.

After I wrote about Extracting RDF data models from Wikidata in my blog last month, Ettore Rizza suggested that I check out wdtaxonomy, which extracts taxonomies from Wikidata by retrieving the kinds of data that my blog entry’s sample queries retrieved, and it then displays the results as a tree. After playing with it, I’m tempted to tell everyone who read that blog entry to ignore the example queries I included, because you can learn a lot more from wdtaxonomy.