Using dbpedia to jumpstart EAC-CPF record creation

Dbpedia offers a wealth of open information in the form of RDF that can be used for all sorts of purposes.  It contains links to resources about the Wikipedia topic available online, the birth and death dates of individuals, subjects, occupations, and a variety of relations.  Additionally, abstracts and names are available in a plethora of languages.  These data can be used to generate fairly sophisticated EAC-CPF stubs, and over the last few weeks I have implemented two approaches to generating EAC from dbpedia RDF.

1. In xEAC, through the XForms interface.
2. With a PHP script which is offered open source in the xEAC github repository.

Generating EAC-CPF stubs with XForms in xEAC

I'll first address #1 above.  Suppose, for example, you are creating a new record in xEAC for Alexander the Great, whose resource is represented by http://dbpedia.org/resource/Alexander_the_Great.  By clicking the "Import DBpedia Data" trigger at the top of the page, a window will launch for the user to enter the resource URI.  After checking to see whether that is a viable resource, the user will have a list of options to check for importation: names, abstract, exist dates, CPF relations, resource relations, and thumbnail.