For a top-secret project, I am looking at retrieving all entities that represent a ‘(historic) event’, from DBPedia.
Now I could rant about how horrible it is to actually formulate a ‘simple’ query like this, using the structured anarchistic Linked Data format, so I will: this request “give me all entities that represent ‘events’ from DBPedia” takes me 3 SPARQL queries, since different predicates represent the same thing, but probably I need a lot more to get a proper subset of the entities I’m looking for. Currently, I filter for entities that have a dbpedia-owl:date property, a dbprop:date property (yes, these predicated express the exact same property) and entities that belong to the Event class.
Anyway, if we count for each year how many event entities there are, we get the following graph:
Which is interesting, because it shows how there are loads of events in the near past, and around WWII, and around WWI. I could now say something about how interesting it is that our collective memory is focused on the near past, but then I looked at the events and saw loads of sports events, so I won’t, but rather say that back in the days we were terrible at organizing sports events. Still, the knowledge that between 1900 and today a total of 16.589 events happened seems significant to me.
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