Wikidata harvests birth/death dates from ULAN

[Vladimir Alexiev]

https://twitter.com/vrandezo/status/913776754564546565

Magnus Manske‏ (famous Wikidata developer) just reported "I have harvested ~2.3M birth/death dates from Mix’n’match catalogs".

Denny Vrandečić‏ (of Wikidata and Google fame) was quite excited.

What this means is that when an item is matched from one of the ~800 authority files in Mix’n’match to Wikidata, 

Wikidata can now use birth/death dates from that authority file.

ULAN is https://tools.wmflabs.org/mix-n-match/#/catalog/27 and the stats are:

Manually matched 60549, Automatically matched (need confirmation) 19058, Unmatched 104026

More info at: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Magnus_Manske/Mix%27n%27match_date_import

I had a lingering doubt because ULAN dates sometimes are imprecise estimates: http://vocab.getty.edu/doc/#Estimated_Dates

But the code that handles ULAN (catalog 27) is here:

https://bitbucket.org/magnusmanske/mixnmatch/src/33507abca590e83761d763b38af81692a0db5958/update_person_dates.php?at=master&fileviewer=file-view-default#update_person_dates.php-73

and Magnus is parsing the dates out of the descriptions (preferred biography),

and the GVP doc says "display the following field... schema:description (Biography), a "one-line biography" of the agent".

So I believe the display dates are always accurate, and can be used.

Of course, wikidata could use a lot more info from authority files, eg names, occupations, nationalities... This is just a start

[vladimir...@ontotext.com]

https://twitter.com/valexiev1/status/966307495215095808:

Wikidata now has 2496 external-id props (links to other authorities), of which 769 are subject to coreferencing in MnM.