Wikidata properties of people

[Richard Light]

Hi,

Further to the discussion at Linked Pasts 8, I tried asking for all the distinct properties that WikiData has for its 10 million+ people (wd:Q5). By the time the query timed out it had identified nearly 7,000 properties. This does suggest that working with existing practice might not be the most effective way to make progress, but I'm attaching the results I did get, in case anyone is interested or wants to do something with them.

I was trying to get a count of each property, but (a) this went beyond my memory of SPARQL syntax and (b) if this simpler query timed out, a more complex one wouldn't have a prayer.

Richard

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Richard Light
richard...@gmail.com
@richardofsussex

[Richard Light]

If we're looking for what WikiData itself considers to be the key properties of a person, the list of "properties for this type" in https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q5 gives useful guidance. (Clearly, in practice, many more properties than those listed here have actually been used.)

There is a depressing lack of an event-based approach to these properties. 'event' - Q1190554 - does not feature on the list at all, nor does 'activity' - Q1914636 - or 'human activity' - Q61788060. So, you have 'date of birth' and 'place of birth' as independent properties. We may decide that we don't want to follow this 'shorts cuts everywhere' approach ...

Richard

[Karl Grossner]

7,000 - impressive! ;^)

not exactly parallel, but when I looked for types of places there were only 900 or so!

kg

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[Richard Light]

Indeed. By limiting my query to a subset of people (safely dead ones, with an image of their grave stone):

#Properties of person instances where there is an image of their grave, ordered by frequency of property use
SELECT (COUNT(?property) as ?pcount ) ?property WHERE {
    ?item wdt:P31 wd:Q5; wdt:P1442 ?type1; ?property ?object .
 
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en". }
}
GROUP BY ?property
ORDER BY DESC(?pcount)
LIMIT 1000

I can actually get a result (attached). It's what you would expect: common properties such as place and date of birth and death, given name and family name, sex or gender, occupation, together with a whole raft of different types of identifier (WorldCat; ISNI; LoC authority ID; Freebase ID).  I've only got the first 1000 properties ...

Richard

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ancient-people/1a6564e7-5a6a-cb13-104f-c20ac1812b4b%40gmail.com.