Structured Data on Commons Part Four – Depicts Statements

Now that the underlying software for Structured Data on Commons has been put in place, along with Captions helping to demonstrate the software worked, the development team was ready to release the first form of structured statements for Commons: depicts.

Depicts is a statement for representing the concepts or topics present or expressed in a media file. The depicts statement can be considered the most basic example for modeling information about a file.

With support for depicts, people searching for specific media files on Commons can begin finding them in a structured, multilingual way. At the time of release, depicts statements can be searched using the keyword haswbstatement. For example, if you wanted to find all instances of depicts (P180) a house cat (Q146), in the search bar you can use: haswbstatement:P180=Q146 and it will return results in all languages.

After making sure basic depicts support was working, the development team added support for qualifiers. By using qualifiers for depicts, users are able to represent the file even further by refining, contextualizing, or expanding the simple statement. For example, the previous statement of depicts (P180) a house cat (Q146) can be refined to depicts (P180) a house cat (Q146) [color: gray (Q42519)] and will return only files with statements that match a gray cat. As with basic depicts, this functionality is multilingual and will find whatever languages are available.

Now that Commons has the most basic modeling for data in a file in place, the development team turned to supporting other types of statements beyond depicts. These other types of statements will be covered in the next part.

Next: Structured Data on Commons Part Five – Other Statements

Previously: Part Three – Multilingual File Captions