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Human Alive-ness API

It works by querying Wikidata via SPARQL to search for birth and death dates of a person.

Requires an exact name match. It will throw if it can't find results. It will return true if every match has a birth date and not a death date. (It will return false if a match does not have a birth date, because we assume that to mean they are a historical figure whose birthdate we don't know.)

Create val
@stevekrouse.alive("Henry Kissinger") // true (for now)

You can view some example usages / tests here: https://www.val.town/v/stevekrouse.aliveTests

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import { wikidata } from "https://esm.town/v/stevekrouse/wikidata";
export async function alive(name) {
let data = await wikidata(
`SELECT ?person ?personLabel ?birth_date ?death_date WHERE {
?person rdfs:label "${name}"@en;
wdt:P31 wd:Q5 . # Ensure the entity is a human
OPTIONAL {
?person wdt:P570 ?death_date . # Try to find a date of death
}
OPTIONAL {
?person wdt:P569 ?birth_date . # Date of birth
}
SERVICE wikibase:label { bd:serviceParam wikibase:language "[AUTO_LANGUAGE],en". }
}`,
);
if (!data.results.bindings.length)
throw "Could not find " + name;
return data.results.bindings.every((b) => b.birth_date && !b.death_date);
}
October 23, 2023