Research in programming Wikidata/Archive

The article is devoted to the investigation of the Wikidata object — "Archives". With the help of SPARQL queries, computed on objects of the "archives" type in the Wikidata, the following tasks were solved: all archives in Russia were listed, a map of the archives located in the Russian Federation was generated. Conclusions were made about the completeness of the Wikidata on this topic and a map of the archives of the world was draw after adding geographic coordinates to archives.

Instances of the Archive object

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#List of archive in English and Russian
SELECT ?archive ?label_en ?label_ru 
WHERE {
  ?archive wdt:P31 wd:Q166118. #instance of archive
  ?archive rdfs:label ?label_en.
  ?archive rdfs:label ?label_ru.
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }
      }

SPARQL-query, 32 results.

The most complete and elaborated archives on the Wikidata are: Internet Archive, Wikimedia Commons, Presidential Library of Ronald Reagan.
Almost empty and uninformative archives were: National Archives of the Republic of Karelia, Federal Archival Agency, Russian State Military Archive.

According to ProWD the Internet Archive is the leader in terms of the number of properties (32 properties) among archives around the world. Russian State Archive of Economy contains 12 properties. This is the maximum number of properties for Russian archives.

Distribution of archives on the world map

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Let's show the geographic location of archives on the world map based on the "location" property, determine the geographic coordinates of the archives and put the archives on the world map.

#List of archives on the world map 
#defaultView:Map
#28 October 2017
SELECT ?archive ?archiveLabel ?location WHERE {
  ?archive wdt:P31 wd:Q166118. #instance of archive
  ?archive wdt:P625 ?location. #instance location of archive
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }
}

SPARQL-query, 672 results.

Fig. 1. 672 archives on the world map based on the Wikidata on October 28, 2017


This map shows that most of the archives based on the Wikidata (on October 28, 2017) were located in Europe.

Completeness of the Wikidata

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There are 5 archives according to the category List of archives in Russia in English Wikipedia. Apparently, this section includes a list of the largest archives in Russia.

According to the category of List of national archives in English Wikipedia there are 147 archives in the world.

According to the Archives of Russia portal, state and municipal archives from institutions for permanent storage have taken about 1.5 million items [1]. Only in the federal archives there were about 100 thousand cases of management documentation and over 100 thousand cases of personnel.

The total number of countries in the world is 193. According to the category List of archives in English Wikipedia, there are 190 countries in which there are archives.

The following script shows the number of archives in each country in the world.

SELECT ?countryLabel (COUNT(?org) AS ?count) WHERE {
  ?org wdt:P31 wd:Q166118. #instance of archive
  ?org wdt:P17 ?country. #instance country of archive
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }
}
GROUP BY ?country ?countryLabel
ORDER BY DESC(?count)

SPARQL-query, 70 results.

As a result, the script issues 70 countries, which indicates that the Wikidata are not complete enough for archives, because not all archives have the "state" property. The top ten countries by number of archives include:

  1. Germany (486 archives),
  2. Spain (141 archives),
  3. Bulgaria (110 archives),
  4. United Kingdom (75 archives),
  5. United States of America (61 archives),
  6. Belgium (54 archives),
  7. Russia (46 archives - after adding data, 2 archives - before work),
  8. Poland (35 archives),
  9. Switzerland (28 archives),
  10. The Netherlands (26 archives).

Wikidata editing

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According to the script written above, in Russia there are 9 archives. The information about the Russian archives is not complete enough in the Wikidata. It should be corrected.

A script finds these 9 archives.

#Russian archiveson the map
#28 October 2017
SELECT ?archive?archiveLabel WHERE {
  ?archive wdt:P31 wd:Q166118. #instance of archive
  ?archive wdt:P17 wd:Q159. #instance country Russia of archive
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }
}

SPARQL-query, 9 results.

Let's show Russian archives on the map.

#List of archives in Russia 
#defaultView:Map
SELECT ?archive ?archiveLabel ?location WHERE {
  ?archive wdt:P31 wd:Q166118. #instance of archive
  ?archive wdt:P17 wd:Q159. #instance country Russia of archive
  ?archive wdt:P625 ?location.  #geographical coordinates of archive
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }
}

SPARQL-query, 2 results.

Fig. 2. Two Russian archives on the map based on the Wikidata on October 28, 2017


It turned out that not all the Russian archives presented in the Wikidata are depicted on the map. Therefore, it is necessary for each Russian archive presented in the Wikidata to add the properties: "instance of", "country", "coordinate location".

After adding geographic coordinates, the archives recorded 46 items on the map.

#Archives on the map
#29 October 2017
SELECT ?archive ?archiveLabel ?location WHERE {
  ?archive wdt:P31 wd:Q166118. #instance of archive
  ?archive wdt:P17 wd:Q159. #Russia
  ?archive wdt:P625 ?location.  #geographical coordinates of archive
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }
}

SPARQL-query, 46 results.

Fig. 3. 46 Russian archives on the map based on the Wikidata on October 29, 2017


Let's build a map of the world with newly added national archives.

#Archives on the world map 
SELECT ?archive ?location WHERE {
  ?archive wdt:P31 wd:Q166118.  #instance of archive
  ?archive wdt:P625 ?location.  #geographical coordinates of archive
  SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "en". }
}

SPARQL-query, 723 results.

Fig. 4. 723 archives on the world map based on the Wikidata on October 29, 2017


Future work

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  • Display the list of the founders of the archives of the world.
  • Draw archives on the world map with an indication of the volume of the archive (the size of the circle on the map corresponds to the volume of the archive).
  • Count the volume of archives by continents.

Exercises

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2 Arrange countries in descending order of the number of archives on countries (1 - means the smallest number of archives in the country):

1 2 3 4 5 6
Germany
Spain
USA
Russia
Finland
Norway


SPARQL queries with replies:

References

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  1. Archives of Russia portal 2001.
  • "Federal Law of the Russian Federation of October 22, 2004 N 125-FZ". October 22, 2004.
  • "Archives of Russia portal". 2001.
  • Krizhanovsky A.A., Anisimova M.S. (2017). "Geographical Investigation of the Archives of Russia and the World". Authorea.
  • Krizhanovsky A. (2020). "Archives in Russia". ProWD.