Recently, the current lookup options in lobid-gnd turned out to not be enough for a use case we were facing. We needed to associate date and place of a person’s birth/death but couldn’t. So we added this option for everyone to benefit from. Now, you can get auto-suggests for GND persons that include a good overview of birth/death dates and places, occupations/professions and places of activity. They might for example look like this:
How do I make lobid return a custom autosuggest format?
We have documented the configuration of such a customized GND autosuggest string in the API documentation.
For example, here is the query that returns autosuggestions like the above: rowohlt+AND+type:Person&format=json:preferredName,*_dateOfBirth+_placeOfBirth,†_dateOfDeath+_placeOfDeath,placeOfActivity,professionOrOccupation
The reponse to this query looks like this:
[ {
"label" : "Rowohlt, Hilda | † 1943",
"id" : "https://d-nb.info/gnd/116004595X",
"category" : "Individualisierte Person"
}, {
"label" : "Rowohlt, Charlotta | Schauspielerin",
"id" : "https://d-nb.info/gnd/124750848X",
"category" : "Individualisierte Person"
}, {
"label" : "Rowohlt, Heinrich",
"id" : "https://d-nb.info/gnd/139303960",
"category" : "Individualisierte Person"
}, {
"image" : "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/HARRYROW.jpg?width=100",
"label" : "Rowohlt, Harry | * 1945 Hamburg | † 2015 Hamburg | Schriftsteller; Lyriker; Verleger; Journalist; Sprecher; Übersetzer",
"id" : "https://d-nb.info/gnd/107828553",
"category" : "Individualisierte Person"
}, {
"label" : "Rowohlt, Hilde",
"id" : "https://d-nb.info/gnd/116667230",
"category" : "Individualisierte Person"
}, {
"label" : "Rowohlt, Ernst | * 1887 Bremen | † 1960 Hamburg | Leipzig; Berlin | Verleger",
"id" : "https://d-nb.info/gnd/118603493",
"category" : "Individualisierte Person"
}, {
"label" : "Pierenkämper-Rowohlt, Maria | * 1910 | † 2005 | Hamburg-Volksdorf | Schauspielerin",
"id" : "https://d-nb.info/gnd/116184620",
"category" : "Individualisierte Person"
}, {
"label" : "Ledig-Rowohlt, Heinrich Maria | * 1908 Leipzig | † 1992 Delhi | Verleger",
"id" : "https://d-nb.info/gnd/118570757",
"category" : "Individualisierte Person"
}, {
"label" : "Ledig-Rowohlt, Jane | † 1994 | Hamburg",
"id" : "https://d-nb.info/gnd/116853166",
"category" : "Individualisierte Person"
}, {
"label" : "Pierenkämpfer, Maria | * [19XX] | Schauspielerin",
"id" : "https://d-nb.info/gnd/1329213513",
"category" : "Individualisierte Person"
} ]
Basically, as with autosuggest queries before, you have to configure the response payload by using the format=json parameter, add a trailing colon and then the configuration bit which in our case is preferredName,*_dateOfBirth+_placeOfBirth,†_dateOfDeath+_placeOfDeath,placeOfActivity,professionOrOccupation.
As usual, you have a comma-seperated list of all the field contents you want to be returned. The additional option is provided by allowing to use _{field} with the addition of custom characters like “†”. I could also use “born in”/”died in” instead, like this: preferredName,born in_dateOfBirth,placeOfBirth,died in_dateOfDeath,placeOfDeath,placeOfActivity,professionOrOccupation
We hope that others will also benefit from this option. Let us know if you like it.
This feature was added in the context of a project where we are building a new editorial backend for the regional bibliography and person database of Rhineland-Palatinate (RPB & RPPD). For looking up GND IDs in the Strapi-based editorial backend, we are relying on the lobid-gnd API. We were happy to play back the needed improvements for the lookups into the lobid-gnd service.
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