Bridging NFDI’s culture and chemistry knowledge graphs | Biopragmatics

[utterances-bot]

Bridging NFDI’s culture and chemistry knowledge graphs | Biopragmatics

At the sixth NFDI4Chem consortium meeting, Torsten Schrade from the NFDI4Culture consortium gave a lovely and whimsical talk entitled A Data Alchemist’s Journey through NFDI which explored ways that we might federate and jointly query both consortia’s knowledge via their respective SPARQL endpoints. He proposed a toy example in which he linked paintings depicting alchemists trying to make gold to compounds containing gold. This post is about the steps I took to automate his toy example and extend it to not only chemicals or compounds represented in Iconclass, but also equipment and devices.

https://cthoyt.com/2025/10/07/bridging-culture-and-chemistry.html

[epoz]

Fabulous blogpost Charles, well done.

The idiosyncrasies of Iconclass are meant that way, it was originally designed in the 1940s for Art History. Your adding of "depiction of" is spot-on, that is what it is meant for. Every notation in the system is only supposed to be there justified by the fact that it has been used to group depictions of that concept. It is not a general ontology, but a visual classification system.

Did you register with iconclass.org? If you login there, you can also see the bibliography references and do some more interesting searches using embeddings.

[epoz]

...and yes, the lack of IC labels in the NFDI4Culture KG is on the todo-list.
We are not only adding IC, but also other external vocabularies like GND, VIAF, Getty etc.

You could also fetch the labels with another federated query from the Iconclass endpoint (in SKOS) - but in my experiences once you start doing too many federated queries it becomes a bit of a house of cards. (and sometimes other ontologies use other properties for labels, and not rdfs:label as a generic) So it is convenient to have a "utility" label present in the graph where you are describing things.