Comments on: I link therefore I am

By: Research Australia and Trove « Australia New Zealand Digital Encyclopedias Group

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 06:15:00 +0000

[...] In that same post, I mentioned how people like Tim Sherratt are starting to build ways to access the data if you are not an institution. Wragge’s Identity Browser is designed for finding just one name and the link that will point to it. This is handy if you are writing a blog post about someone, for example, and want to link to them. Tim has described how it all works in I link therefore I am. [...]

By: Linking to Trove « Australia New Zealand Digital Encyclopedias Group

Linking to Trove « Australia New Zealand Digital Encyclopedias Group — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 04:40:39 +0000

[...] Sometimes, though, you just want to link one or two names to Trove. Maybe you want to disambiguate someone in a blog post. In that case, think about using Wragge’s Identity Browser. Tim Sherratt has written Wragge’s Identity Browser as a Python library that helps you to quickly generate an RDFa link to someone in Trove. That means that you can link to a person in Trove and (with the help of a Friend of a Friend (FOAF) prefix mapping) tell harvesters that this is a link to a person and that person is Grace Cossington Smith. All that semantic goodness. Tim has described how it all works in I link therefore I am. [...]

By: b3rn

b3rn — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 02:16:59 +0000

Thanks Tim, very helpful

By: tim

tim — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 00:08:59 +0000

B3rn – Well there’s the WWII nominal roll – no rdf, but there do seem to be individual identifiers for people. So you could use foaf:isPrimaryTopicOf links to http://www.ww2roll.gov.au/script/veteran.asp?VeteranID=veteran_id. If the DVA could expose this data through OAI-PMH then People Australia could ingest it, creating the possibility of further links. (Another job for you Basil?) Perhaps we should start lobbying DVA.

The other possibility is to use their service records in the National Archives. There’s info on finding them here: Once you’ve found a service record (and perhaps requested it to be digitised) you can create a persistent url using the following formula: http://www.naa.gov.au/cgi-bin/Search?O=I&Number=barcode – where barcode is the file barcode. Barcodes are unique and, in most cases, persistent, so they can provide a quasi-identifier.

Once again I would hope that the NAA will start to expose its people data so it can be ingested by People Australia, but…

By: Basil Dewhurst

Basil Dewhurst — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 22:48:33 +0000

Note that the People Australia SRU interface that Tim is using (http://www.nla.gov.au/apps/srw/search/peopleaustralia) provides 44 searchable indexes including surname, forename, identifiers, description, possessingInstitution, biography, relatedname, relatedresource and, the catchall, anywhere.

Also, to make life even easier, in the near future we’ll be implementing pattern matching.

By: b3rn

b3rn — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 08:08:45 +0000

Great post. I’m working in my spare time on a WWII honour roll that lists local residents. I’ll be looking to RDF the content (that is, the people). Any suggestions or ideas? Ideally it will allow links (now or in the future) with other resources & institutions.

By: tim

tim — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 05:07:43 +0000

Andrew, I’d hoped the page links might alleviate some of that problem, but you’re quite right, it’s not very satisfactory.

The main problem at the moment is that (last time I checked) pattern matching wasn’t working on the SRU interface, so that makes it impossible to filter by initial.

I could put in an other names box, but sometimes only initials are recorded, so I was concerned that there’d end up being quite a lot of false negatives.

So I decided to stay just with the surname search until pattern matching was working. Once that’s fixed I’ll refine the search interface.

By: Andrew Wilson

Andrew Wilson — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 03:26:33 +0000

Hi Tim

THis is very cool stuff. However, I did a search on ‘wilson’ using Wragge’s and it came back with over 1300 names – I don’t think most people will be bothered to go through a lsit that long. Is there any way of refining the search or the result set?
cheers
Andrew