At least a make shift solution: The “Julian calendar stabiliser”

My last blog post triggered a couple of responses on Twitter. It seems I touched a problem that will not be solved that easily.

Save a date as a Julian calendar date on your Wikibase (manually or, with the /J switch, in your QuickStatements mass input) and your Wikibase will be able to handle this date correctly in any mixed bag of Julian and Gregorian dates. It is nice that the Query Service is able to produce straight timelines out of any such mixed bag, but immensely problematic that you will be quite unable to get any of the Julian dates back in the nominal format in which you stated them on your Wikibase. Blazegraph, the tool that works behind the Query Service, does its job in a normalisation of dates, and this normalisation is, of course, done in the superior Gregorian calendar. Our Wikibase Query Services will hence produce loads of dates that will in their first wave just contradict the documentary evidence. We will then see successive deformations of these dates wherever someone fails to read them as, from here onwards, proper Gregorian. Most databases have a single calendar format: you simply enter all your dates as you read them in your documents or whatsoever source you are exploiting. Gregorianised dates should not enter any such database.

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Quelle: https://blog.factgrid.de/archives/3541

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Filling a Wikibase instance with Millions of Data

As more and more Wikibase instances are coming into existence we are seeing attempts to start them with masses of data from already existing data bases that switch to the new software.

Experimenting I tried to find a faster way to insert a huge amount of items into a Wikibase instance. I have not been able to insert more than two or three statements per second using the ‘official’ tools, such as QuickStatements or the WDI library.

Therefore, I am inserting the data directly into the MySQL database used by Wikibase.

The process consists of these steps:

  • generate the data for an item in JSON
  • determine the next Q number and update the JSON item data accordingly


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Quelle: https://blog.factgrid.de/archives/2013

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2018-06-11/12: Daten in das FactGrid füllen — praktischer Workshop der Gothaer Forschungsstelle Illuminatenforschung

Liebe Erfurter und Gothaer FactGrid Interessierte,

in den letzten Wochen arbeiteten wir im engeren Kreis an der Einrichtung einer WikiBase-Instanz (der Software hinter dem Wikidata-Projekt) auf dem Server der Uni Erfurt: https://database.factgrid.de/

Es gab einige technische Schwierigkeiten bei der Anpassung der Tools an die neue Server-Umgebung zu bewältigen, doch sind wir seit einigen Tagen soweit, dass die Grundausstattung läuft: QuickStatements steht für den massenweisen Datenimport zur Verfügung. Der Query Service läuft, so dass wir SPARQL-Abfragen von Daten hinkriegen. Das Design (Logo etc.) ist noch offen – was im Moment den Vorteil hat, dass alles wie bei Wikidata aussieht. Matti Blume arbeitet daran, die Datensätze des Illuminatenprojektes für den Projektstart in die Datenbank zu füllen.



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Quelle: https://blog.factgrid.de/archives/884

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The (sobering) status report of Friday 13, April 2018

[A version of this was originally posted here]

[Postscript Friday 4, May 2018: SPARQL is on, we are in the middle of our first more massiv data input]

Four months have passed since the kick-off workshop shop, and the FactGrid project has run into its first unexpected problems. We are confident that we will solve the – primarily technical – issues, but one of the lessons we have learned so far is that we will need the support of a larger community in order to situate the FactGrid Project with more impact in the Wikidata-community.

What do we want to achieve? We are still trying to launch a Wikibase installation with the aim to offer a platform for original research. Data hosted on the FactGrid will be free to be used by Wikidata. Data will leave the FactGrid database, however, with the personal authorisations of research which Wikidata is not be able to generate.

Digital humanities projects interested to work on the collective FactGrid platform will sponsor software developments with their respective DH-funding.

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Quelle: https://blog.factgrid.de/archives/817

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