national-gallery-api 0.1.1

Python client for the National Gallery (London) Elasticsearch API

National Gallery API Wrapper

A small Python wrapper around the National Gallery (London) Elasticsearch search endpoint (https://data.ng.ac.uk/es/public/_search). The library aims to provide:

1. A more pythonic interface with the National Gallery API
2. Plain-text rendering of records e.g. for use in LLM prompts (entity disambiguation, authority linking, etc.)

National Gallery data is offered for reuse under specific licences.

Setup

# sync only
pip install national-gallery-api

# sync and async
pip install "national-gallery-api[async]"

Quick start

The following entities are available: people, organisations, works, events, exhibitions, places, locations, concepts, publications, archives, media, and packages.

Search records

from national_gallery_api import NationalGallery

with NationalGallery() as ng:
    results = ng.people.search("rembrandt", actual="Individual", size=5)

    for person in results:
        print(person.title, person.pid, person.dates)

Look up a single record by PID

with NationalGallery() as ng:
    vincent = ng.people.get("0QCE-0001-0000-0000")
    print(vincent.title)          # Vincent van Gogh
    print(vincent.external_ids)   # ULAN, Wikidata, RKD, VIAF, ...

Iterate over all results

iter_all lazily walks an entire result set, handling paging internally:

with NationalGallery() as ng:
    for person in ng.people.iter_all(actual="Individual", page_size=100):
        ...

Caching

Caching is disabled by default. To minimise server load when making frequent repeat requests (e.g. during batch jobs), cache should be enabled:

with NationalGallery(cache=True, ttl=3600, database_path="hishel_cache.db") as ng:
    ...

Async

AsyncNationalGallery mirrors the sync client.

import asyncio
from national_gallery_api import AsyncNationalGallery

async def main():
    async with AsyncNationalGallery() as ng:
        results = await ng.works.search("portrait", size=5)
        for work in results:
            ...

        async for work in ng.works.iter_all("portrait", page_size=50):
            ...

asyncio.run(main())

Rendering for LLM context

from national_gallery_api import NationalGallery, to_context, render_candidates

with NationalGallery() as ng:
    vincent = ng.people.get("0QCE-0001-0000-0000")
    print(to_context(vincent)) # for single entities

    candidates = ng.people.search("rembrandt", actual="Individual", size=5)
    print(render_candidates(candidates)) # for record sets

Example to_context output:

Person: Vincent van Gogh
  PID: 0QCE-0001-0000-0000
  Subtype: Individual
  Dates: 1853 - 1890
  Names: Vincent van Gogh; Gogh, Vincent van
  External IDs: http://viaf.org/viaf/9854560; http://vocab.getty.edu/ulan/500115588; https://rkd.nl/artists/32439; https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q5582

Raw Elasticsearch queries

If a query or field is not covered by the typed API, raw Elasticsearch queries can be made, returning an unparsed response dict:

with NationalGallery() as ng:
    payload = ng.search({"query": {"match_all": {}}, "size": 0})
    print(payload["hits"]["total"])

Query bodies can also be built with the build_search helper:

from national_gallery_api import build_search, EntityType

body = build_search("van gogh", base=EntityType.AGENT, actual="Individual", size=10)