RKDartists as Linked Open Data

RKDartists is a freely available online database that contains biographical data about artists, companies and institutes of various disciplines of visual arts, applied arts and architecture from both the Netherlands as abroad. It also contains information about collectors, art historians, researchers, art critics and other institutes active in the arts domain.

The RKD strives to publish the RKDartists data in a linked, open and usable way. To provide an accessible entry point to the data, we have chosen to model a subset of the available information with the schema.org vocabulary. This data is available in de RKD Schema.org Knowledge Graph. All persons and institutes included in RKDartists are accessible in the schema.org graph. The most important data elements such as 'preferred name', 'name variations', 'gender', 'nationality/school', 'places and dates of birth and death' have been entered; all essential biographical data to load or connect to your own data, are available in schema.org patterns.

The full extent of the RKDartists dataset is much larger. To respect the nuance of the data, it has been modeled in keeping with the Linked Art model. This data, as well as the data from other RKD datasets, is publicly available in the RKD Knowledge Graph. Further below is an instruction on how to combine the data from the two graphs via SPARQL, if so desired.

License

RKD made the RKDartists LOD available under the Open Data Common Attribution License (ODC-BY) version 1.0. The text below gives a summary of the conditions to use the service and data:

You are free:

• To share: to copy, distribute and use the database
• To create: to produce works from the database
• To adapt: to modify, transform and build upon the database

As long as you:

• Attribute: You must attribute any public use of the database, or works produced from the database, in the manner specified in the license. For any use or redistribution of the database, or works produced from it, you must make clear to others the license of the database and keep intact any notices on the original database.

Therefore, it is free to use the data as long as you 'Attribute'. The RKD recommends you do so by linking back (deep link) to the RKDartists records in the original RKDartists context. By linking back you make a connection to the complete context of the data including the sources for the data. We believe this type of 'Attribution' is the best way to justify the idea of LOD.

Data patterns explained

All RKDartists entities in the set are identified by a URI that follows this format: https://data.rkd.nl/artists/ . For example, Rembrandt is https://data.rkd.nl/artists/66129.

Type

Entities in the RKDartists set can be either persons, groups of people or organisations. As such, the type of any artist in de dataset is either a schema.org/Person (for individuals) or a schema.org/Organisation, with corresponding schema.org properties.

Person

For Persons, the following properties are available:

• identifier
• name
• alternateName
• gender
• nationality
• description
• additionalType
• birthPlace
• birthDate
• deathPlace
• deathDate
• hasOccupation
• workLocation

Organisation

For Organisations, the same properties are used except gender and the properties relating to circumstances of birth and death.

Description of the properties

• identifier - the RKD identifier for the artist. Also used in the URI.
• name - the artist's preferred name as per the RKD database. This literal may have a language attribute.
• alternateName - one or more alternative names
• gender - gender, as a schema.org GenderType
• nationality - nationality or school
• description - several remarks fields are available as schema:description, namely 'nationality remark', 'qualifications remark', 'names remark', 'birthplace and date remark', 'date and place of death remark', and 'family relations'
• additionalType - the artist's qualification(s), e.g. 'painter' or 'collector'
• birthPlace - birthplace
• birthDate - birthdate
• deathPlace - place of death
• deathDate - date of death
• hasOccupation - active period, see notes below.
• workLocation - locations of activity, see notes below

Links to the RKD thesaurus

Several properties link to term in the RKD thesaurus. For ease of use, both the thesaurus URI as well as the Dutch and English labels have been included in this graph. Properties linking to an entity in the RKD thesaurus are: nationality, additionalType, birthPlace, deathPlace and workLocation.

Dates and uncertainty

As is common with art historical data, not all dates are known precisely. Sometimes, artists were born or did die within a certain timespan. To represent this timespan, the RKD uses the ISO 8601 date format time interval as allowed by the schema.org Date Type.

Use of Role in hasOccupation and workLocation

Not unexpectedly, schema.org has no properties to entirely correctly model an artist's 'period of activity'. Nor does it allow for easy pairing of a timespan with 'work location'. Therefore, the RKD uses the schema.org Role Type to further specify these properties.

How to use

Triply interface

TriplyDB comes with a standard user-friendly visual interface that allows the user to browse the data. Have a look at the browser or table view. For more information, see the Triply docs.

SPARQL endpoints

The RKD also offers its own SPARQL endpoint. There is both a SPARQL IDE and an API endpoint.

Currently, the only available SPARQL service is Speedy.

NDE Termennetwerk

RKDartists is also available as set in the NDE Termennetwerk. NDE offers a GraphQL endpoint for querying the Netwerk.

Merging data from other sources

The RKDartists in schema.org dataset functions as an entrypoint to the data. If you would like to use more detailed information about artists, a full Linked Open Data representation of the RKDartists set, as well as the other RKD datasets, can be found in the RKD Knowledge Graph. It also contains the RKD thesaurus data and RKDimages data; both interesting datasets to combine with RKDartists.

If you would like to primarily use the RKDartists schema.org dataset, it's possible to augment this data with information from the RKD Knowledge Graph by using a federated query. For an example, see below.

Contact

For more information, please contact info@rkd.nl.