Artworks in Wikidata

As part of the Data&Musée project, we are interested in the related data available about artworks, artists and museums and monuments related to these works. We have already addressed this issue in the Artworks in DBpedia post. We now look at their coverage by Wikidata from the access point sparql https://query.wikidata.org/.

Technical note: the following RDF prefixes are used
prefix wd: <http://www.wikidata.org/entity/>
prefix wdt: <http://www.wikidata.org/prop/direct/>

Number of Artworks and their Types

We looked in Wikidata for entities of the types CreativeWork (wd: Q17537576), Painting (wd: Q3305213) and Artwork (wd: Q838948).Nombre d’œuvres et leurs types

SELECT ?type (count(DISTINCT ?oeuvre) as ?c)  WHERE {
  VALUES ?type {wd:Q838948 wd:Q17537576 wd:Q3305213}
  ?oeuvre wdt:P31 ?type.
}
group by ?type
order by desc(?c)

Which give

Links between artworks and museums

Now, let’s look for those that have a direct link to a museum. To avoid timeouts on wikidata, we will make a query with each type of previous work on the following model

SELECT ?type (COUNT(DISTINCT ?oeuvre) AS ?c)  WHERE {
  VALUES ?type { wd:Q838948  }
  ?oeuvre wdt:P31 ?type.
  { ?oeuvre ?link ?museum. } union { ?museum ?link ?oeuvre. }
  ?museum wdt:P31 wd:Q33506.
}
GROUP BY ?type
ORDER BY DESC (?c)

which give

One can ask for the number of entities of type wd: Q33506 (museum):

select (count(distinct ?museum) as ?c)
where {
?museum wdt:P31 wd: Q33506 
}

There are 34606. This suggests that many museums are known, and that there are many links with artworks, especially paintings.

LLinks between artworks and people

Now let’s see how the artworks are related to people (wd: Q5), type by type on the following model:

SELECT ?type (COUNT(DISTINCT ?oeuvre) AS ?c) WHERE {
  VALUES ?type {    wd:Q838948  }
  ?oeuvre wdt:P31 ?type.
  { ?oeuvre ?link ?artist. }   UNION  { ?artist ?link ?oeuvre. }
  ?artist wdt:P31 wd:Q5.
}
GROUP BY ?type
ORDER BY DESC (?c)

which give

We see that in Wikidata, there are links between artworks and people, but on a relatively small proportion of artworks. There is still work to be done to improve Wikidata’s knowledge of artworks! It’s your turn……