The current Linked Open Data (LOD) trend makes available huge amounts of machine processable information across all domains. The machine readable knowledge collection dbpedia (an extraction of information from Wikipedia) contains interesting information that might be interesting for further enriching information on Mark Lombardi.

The project The Graph Of Ideas by “Griff” shows visualizations of all dbpedia information contained in influencedBy relations. Visualising Related Entries in Wikipedia Using Gephi describes how to import dbpedia information directly into Gephi and how to visualize networks of concepts related by the above relation.

However, it turns out that the “relatedness” of information on Mark Lombardi in the LOD cloud is very low. The respective dbpedia entry consists of a mere 66 facts, none of the relates to other artists, persons or institutions. Other potential relevant datasets like the freebase entry or the ULAN entry on Lombardi contain even less information.

So taking the Linked Open Data cloud as another source for enriching information on Lombardi turns out not to be practical yet. It also shows that extracting relations from eg. the text corpus or the works and publishing them in the LOD cloud is a valuable contribution. However, it also shows that digitizing art information in general is an enormous project.