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Category: Metadata

Posted on May 2, 2019October 24, 2024

The International Computer Game Collection is online

The International Computer Game Collection (ICS) is a project of the Computer Games Museum Berlin, the Entertainment Software Self-Regulation, the Computer Games Collections of the Centre for Computer Games Research at the University of Potsdam (DIGAREC), the game-Association and the Stiftung Digitale Spielekultur. The goal is to establish an institution for collecting, documenting and preserving the phenomenon of digital Gaming. The total amount of the united collections is about 58,000 games and still growing. Recently the website of the ICS was published (www.interntionale-computerspielesammlung.de). The visitor could search through the data from different collections, which are already ingested. Currently approx. 40,000 are games recorded.
This first phase of the project was financed by the German Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure. It includes the amalgamation of the recorded data in one database system. The open source framework Collective Access with the Pawtucket frontend was used for this purpose. In the following phase, the data will be consolidated and enriched to improve the general quality of data. This necessary but time-consuming process must be carried out in the second phase of the project, which also includes the physical union of the collections themselves in one storage location.
The ICS intends to serve research and documentation purposes. The stablished information system is also used as a collection management. It includes several different modules for internal processes such as cataloguing, loans management, conservation and long-term archiving needs. For legal reasons, however, these modules are not publicly accessible. Both the development of the system and the input and control of data will be completed once the collections have physically brought together in one location.
The basis of the management system was developed at the Computer Games Museum about 10 years ago. At that time no suitable database system was available, which could be used for managing a collection of computer games, particularly regarding authority files and aspects of long-term preservation. It stands to reason to develop an appropriate concept and to establish Collective Access as database framework. This concept was refined, changed and expanded in the following years.
For practical reasons, the metadata describing Games are divided into three aspects: Work, Version and Object. Since there are numerous compilations of games in the collection (e. g. “Gold Games”, “Stronghold Compilation” etc.), the system is structured in such a way that the game theme, its mechanics and other content related aspects could be recorded in the “Work” division, the platform with the system requirements and developer information can be found in the “Version” division. The physical information (sales packaging, guides, manuals, data carrier), the origin and the publisher are recorded in the “Object” division. This approach offers enough flexibility to capture objects with several games without repeating any data.
The similarities of this concept with FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) is evident. The most obvious difference to FBFR is, that in our concept “manifestation” and “item” are brought together in the “Object” division. Without going into further similarities and differences at this point, it should be noted that this structure is convenient for further amendment of information on the game, its themes, tropes, settings and game mechanics. New metadata fields could be integrated in the “Work” division (i. e. locations) and doesn’t have to be recorded for every item manually.
Due to technical limitations references to web resources (Linked Open Data, Authority files) have been a problem at the beginning. But the new version of Collective Access offers a very flexible way to use these sources such as Wikidata, Wikipedia, Gemeinsame Normdatei (GND), Art & Architecture Thesaurus and Thesaurus of Geographic Names (both Getty Research Institute), Virtual International Authority File (VIAF) and ICONCLASS (still in experimental stage). Involving these web services should improve clarity and enrich the information structure. Titles in different language are imported on-the-fly from Wikidata, while for additional information on companies and individuals are imported from Wikipedia, if available.
At least, I would like to address a problem that has not yet been finally resolved. When defining the “Works” division, it was assumed that all relevant information on game content and game mechanics should be registered here. It turned out, however, that this split-up not always a constructive way to record game characteristics. Let’s take “Mario Golf” as an example. It is available for various platforms (Nintendo 64, Game Boy Colour, Wii etc.). In this case the one Work entry approach is not very useful, because the gameplay varies in the different systems. This resulted in the necessity to create different Work entries (e. g. Mario Golf Version GBC, Mario Golf Wii). Being aware of this, it turns out that these works are linked to each other via a defined relationship. It would make more sense to define a “Series” division, which is not yet intended according to the current conception. Wikidata (//www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1898865) and mobygames (//www.mobygames.com/game-group/mario-golf-series) use a similar kind of concept.
The publication of the database on the website of the ICS at this time was intended primarily to inform the public about the scope of the collection, even if the mentioned deficiencies are present in the documentation. This information system doesn´t intend to replace existing game databases but it intends to offer additional kinds of information for game research. We will go on, improve the data and expand the use of web services to make this collection more efficient and enriched.

Winfried Bergmeyer
Stiftung Digitale Spielekultur
bergmeyer@internationale-computerspielesammlung.de

Links:
//www.interntionale-computerspielesammlung.de/
//www.computerspielemuseum.de/
//www.usk.de/
//www.digarec.de/
//www.stiftung-digitale-spielekultur.de
//www.collectiveaccess.org/
//www.wikidata.org/
//www.mobygames.com/
//www.iconclass.nl/home
//viaf.org/
//www.dnb.de/DE/Standardisierung/GND/gnd_node.html
//www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/tgn/
//www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/aat/

Posted on January 29, 2019May 23, 2025

Linking the OLAC Video Game Vocabulary with Wikidata

by Tracy Hoffmann (diggr Team) and Peter Chan (Stanford University Libraries)

Wikidata is a free, collaborative knowledge base that anyone can edit. Since its establishment in 2012, it has become a widely used knowledge base and infrastructure. In this blog post we describe why and how we import the OLAC Video Game Genre Vocabulary into Wikidata.

Motivation

OLAC Inc. (Online Audiovisual Catalogers) is an organization in the US for catalogers concerned with all types of nonprint materials. It introduced “OLAC Video Game Genre Vocabulary” in 2018 to support cataloging of video game. The CAMMS/SAC/GFIS/Video game working group in OLAC researched over 200 video game genre terms which were considered for inclusion in the final vocabulary. The list of the sixty-six OLAC authorized video game genre vocabulary terms, guidelines for their use, as well as the related MARC authority records for the terms can be found on OLAC’s website under the category of Cataloging Resources – OLAC video game genre vocabulary, at //www.olacinc.org/video-game-vocabulary. This set of controlled vocabulary for video game is backed by the Library of Congress and is expected to be used by all library catalogers in the US. By adding this set of controlled vocabulary in Wikidata, we will expose it to a wider audience and will also facilitate the linking of video games.

First Part – Property Proposal

To link the vocabulary terms with existing Wikidata items, there has to be a property which is defined as an external identifier. There are special sides where all property proposals were collected and discussed. A template with some information about the vocabulary and some examples has to be filled out. Then we waited curiously for feedback of the community with the aim to reach consensus.
After seven days the property proposal had eight supporters. So, it was a very clear result which outcome was the new OLAC video game vocabulary (P6352) property.

Second Part – Import and Matching

The OLAC Video Game Genre Vocabulary is available at the metadata registry. After download, some data cleaning and preparation via open refine the data was transformed into the needed csv format for import. This included:

Entry ID (eg. 1017)
Entry name (eg. Beat ’em up video games)
Entry description  (eg. Video games in which gameplay focuses on “hand to hand combat, …)
URL Pattern (//metadataregistry.org/uri/olac/$1)
Entry type (Q659563 – video game genre)

With this a mix’n’match catalogue was created. “Mix’n’match can list entries of some external databases, and allows users to match them against Wikidata items.” After a successfull import the data could be matched via browser interface or in the case of no match candidate, new Wikidata items were created.

Mapping the sixty-six genres terms was done quick but as vocabulary mapping is rarely entirely unambiguous there is still a lot to improve. Some issues have already been identified and are being discussed within the Wikidata community: //www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property_talk:P6352

Call for participation

There are special interest groups in Wikidata. One of them is the Video Game Task Force. This WikiProject is the spot to get in touch with the video game community in Wikidata. At the discussion site questions, proposals or references could be posted. So far, a lot has been achieved by some very ambitious members of that group:  more than fifty external identifiers for games, ten for Hard/software and other video game related links to several (specialised) databases have been created. But, there is still a lot to do. For instance, other mix’n’match catalogues wait for matching: See //tools.wmflabs.org/mix-n-match/#/group/video%20games

Wikidata is a great resource for information on video games – especially increasingly for video game research as more and more data is aggregated and modeled. Active participation by the video game research community is highly appreciated and will help to make Wikidata even more useful for researchers.

If you have ideas for data donation or linking with external databases please contact us or get in touch with the Wikidata community directly.

Further reading about video games in Wikidata:
Wikidata and the sum of all video games − 2018 edition

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Posted on June 14, 2018May 23, 2025

Platform Mapping

by Tracy Hoffmann, Peter Mühleder, Florian Rämisch on behalf of the diggr team

The diggr team has recently published a mapping, reference and grouping for platform strings of various video game databases. It is meant to ease mapping, matching and interlinking entities of various game databases.

Problem Statement

In various video game databases (community or institution-driven) different paradigms and ideas are followed for naming platforms. Especially digital re-releases of older games pose a huge problem, as they are sometimes assigned to their initial platform, various new platforms, or some kind of new hybrid indicating that it is a re-release. This makes research across databases, especially interlinking of entities, difficult and sometimes almost impossible.

Due to the fact that most of the existing databases have grown over a long time, some new platforms (e.g. digital Re-Releases) were probably hard to fit into existing data models. The database administrators made different decisions regarding how to cope with the new platforms. As every database has a different purpose and audience, some aspects were valued higher than others in each case. As a result, the coping strategies differ slightly from one database to another. We propose a first draft (Request for comments) to unify these compromises.

Solution

This is meant as a first step towards unification of platform identification. We provide a “master” platform list and a mapping for seven popular video game databases to this master list. It is not exhaustive.

Paradigms

Here are our paradigms

  • any platform has a standardized spelling
  • the standardized spelling is always the common long version of the platform name
  • if there is an equivalent entry in the GAMECIP Platform Vocabulary, link it

Shortcomings

  • At this time every specific arcade or pc platform is mapped to a more general term (e.g. Arcade – Namco System 246 -> Arcade ).

Covered Plattforms

Currently (as of May 2018) we cover seven popular video game databases: ESRB (USA), GameFAQs(USA/intl.), MediaArt (J), Mobygames(USA/intl.), OGDB (USA/intl.), PEGI (EU) and USK (D).

Outlook and Call for Collaboration

The master list we developed follows our use cases and applications. There probably is no “everything-fits-all” master list, which can be used for all possible use cases. Therefore, we strongly encourage you to put it to use and expand on it in your own contexts. This will help to identify shortcomings of our master list and allow us to develop it further together. Feel free to contact us about mistakes in the list or ideas to provide better access to those mappings: team@diggr.link

Access

The data can be accessed in two forms: Either by cloning the repository on github[1] and using the provided platform mapping files. Or by using the github pages, which are served from the dist subdirectory as a static REST API[2]. Using the static REST API version is preferable, as it always serves to up-to-date version, while using a cloned git repository can result in usage of an out-of-date version, e.g. if you forget to pull the latest updates before using it. In some data sources there are platform groups (like “Game Archives”) which include individual platforms. A mapping is located at platform_groups.tsv in the tabular_data folder. The file diggr_vocab.tsv contains the entire standarized vocabulary we used for internal mappings. It also contains links to the GAMECIP Platform Vocabulary.

License and Copyright

JSON-exports contain information about the author, license and copyright information, a version and a date element. We claim no copyright on the data, it therefore is released as Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal. The software, which generates the mapping files is free software under the GNU General Public License v3.

[1] //github.com/diggr/platform_mapping

[2] //diggr.github.io/platform_mapping

Posted on January 1, 2015May 16, 2018

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