{"id":168,"date":"2014-02-11T12:22:47","date_gmt":"2014-02-11T11:22:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.magnusmanske.de\/?p=168"},"modified":"2014-02-11T14:23:56","modified_gmt":"2014-02-11T13:23:56","slug":"modest-doubt-is-called-the-beacon-of-the-wise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/magnusmanske.de\/wordpress\/archives\/168","title":{"rendered":"Modest doubt is called the BEACON of the wise"},"content":{"rendered":"

Now that I got Shakespeare out of the way, I picked up chatter (as they say in the post-Snowden world) about the BEACON<\/a> format again, which seemed to have fallen quiet for a while. In short, BEACON is a simple text format linking two items in different catalogs, usually web sites. There are many examples “in the wild”, often Wikipedia-to-X, with X being VIAF<\/a>, GND<\/a>, or the like.<\/p>\n

Now, one thing has changed in the last year, and that is the emergence of Wikidata. Among other things, it allows us to have a single identifier for an item in the Wikiverse, without having to point at a Wikipedia in one language, with a title that is prone to change. When I saw the BEACON discussion starting up again, I realized that, not only do we now have such identifiers, but that I was sitting on the mother lode of external catalog linkage: Wikidata Query<\/a>. So, I did what I always do: Write a tool<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I have not checked if there are any other Wikidata BEACON mappings out there, but my solution has several points going for it that would be hard to replicate otherwise:<\/p>\n