Experiencing Wikidata Query Service

Today, I took the time to explore Wikidata SPARQL. The first query I ran involved locating triples that had an instance of house cat. The query results appeared in a spreadsheet style format below my search. After learning how to perform these queries, I was able to explore Wikidata and craft my very own queries. To start, I did a simple transition from house cats (Q146) to sloth (Q2274076). Since I kept my property the same but changed the value, I received the same type of exhaustive list that house cats produced but for sloths. Feeling semi-confident about venturing into new queries, I performed additional property value searches that would allow me to text my knowledge of the overall process.

During one of my explorations, I wanted to explore books that fell within the same series as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. At first, I attempted my query with the property as part of the series (P179) with the value as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Q102438). This search yielded no results. After taking a moment to figure out my mistake, I realized that by having my value as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, I wasn’t giving my query anything to search for. To resolve this, I broadened my value to focus on Harry Potter (Q8337). With this value broadened, the query searched for all values of Harry Potter where they had the property of part of the series. With this new query, my results gave me a list of the value IDs and their corresponding labels for all books in the Harry Potter series.

Overall, I found the process somewhat simple, but when it came to using, and searching for properties, the site was not very user friendly. I struggled getting the system to let me retrieve properties, so I located a different wikidata property browser. The site that I found easier to navigate was Wikidata Propbrowse. In this site the search bar allowed me to search for properties according to the value I desired using. I still have a long way to go before I can effectively work with SPARQL but this was a nice dive into experiencing the application.

Comments

  1. StevenDecember 10, 2019 at 10:04 AM

    Good work, Danielle! Keep an eye out for Wikidata learning opportunities as it is becoming an important tool for librarians to know about (e.g., https://www.arl.org/resources/arl-whitepaper-on-wikidata/)

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