Disambiguating the Balls

Is it possible to mix URIs from many sources and obtain something intelligible?
https://tb.semlab.io/share/BALL

BALL, an art dealing family operating in Dresden, Berlin, Paris, New York 

see: Firma Hermann Ball, Firma Ball, Graupe und Ball, A & R Ball, Hermann Ball, Alexander Ball, Richard Ball  

Hermann (Hirsch) Ball (1857 - 1924) and his sons Richard (born 1892) and Alexander operated an art dealership in Dresden, specializing in old masters, furniture and porcelain. The Firma Ball was registered in the Dresden Business Register in 1903 by Hermann Ball. His sons Richard and Alexander Ball joined the business in 1919.*

Alexander Ball, as noted in a previous post, was flagged by the OSS Art Looting Investigation Unit in 1946 for having working closely with notorious art looter Karl Haberstock during the Nazi era.

Yet it is difficult to find out much about him.

Born in Germany, Alexander Ball (also known as Alexandre Ball, Alex Ball or A. Ball) worked in France, before escaping to the USA. In NY, he set up a dealership with his brother Richard Ball, known as  A. and R. Ball, (A&R Ball, A. & R. Ball, etc).

No one source seems to have much information about A and R Ball. The Frick Archives Directory for the History of Collecting in America doesn't seem to have a record for him. The Getty Provenance Index Collector's File mentions a "Ball, A. R." who may or may not be the same person or gallery.  Wikipedia refers the reader to a "British Admiral and Civil Commissioner of Malta" who is not the German art dealer. Other authority files like VIAF are equally vague and confusing. Even such a simple thing as a birthdate appears elusive.

Ball is, unfortunately, both a very common last name and a frequently used noun, so searches frustratingly turn up all kinds of unrelated items.

Glimpses of Alexander Ball and his A & R Ball exist but they are scattered. They are to be found among old newspaper articles (Forbes), oral histories (Thaw), art dealer ledgers (Knoedler), some books and catalogs, the reports of the Roberts Commission and the Art Looting Investigation Unit and museum provenance records. 

How, given the dispersal of sources, to gain an overall view?

Is it possible, linking up everything we can find out about him, to reconstruct the itinerary of Alexander, Richard and A and R Ball?

In this blog post, we make a first attempt to stitch together a few disparate mentions, using a tool called: 

Triple Builder https://tb.semlab.io/ 

Here's how Matt Miller described The Triple Builder Tool in Medium.

It's like github's gist but for RDF with a spreadsheet interface preloaded with common vocabularies to facilitate creating and sharing RDF snippets.

Disambiguate, Match to existing URIs, Describe 

First, we attempted to locate URIs that identified the members of the Ball family, as well as their businesses, partners, suppliers, customers and other relations, in Germany, France and the US.
Then, in a second step, we attempted to describe the relationships in this network using whichever ontologies and vocabularies seemed able to express them.

We wanted to avoid creating any new URIs even though the Triple Builder allows this. The focus was on connecting URIs that already existed.

The result is chaotic and of course riddled with errors entirely of our own making. However it is also much richer and informative than anything we could have done had we limited ourselves to only one mode of expression.

We hope to use an open, iterative approach, learning and improving as we move ahead.  Feedback and ideas are most appreciated.

Links to the result this far...

• https://tb.semlab.io/share/BALL
• in N-Triples
• in Turtle
• in JSON-LD

*(source: Ein Berliner Kunsthändler zwischen Republik, Nationalsozialismus und Exil (A Berlin art dealer caught between the Republic, National Socialism and Exile) by author Patrick Golenia, Kristina Kratz-Kessemeier and Isabelle Le Masne de Chermont. Published: December 2015

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related names:

• Paul Graupe (1881-1953). 
• Rudolph Lepke
• Jansen
• Karl Haberstock
• de Beauperthuys, Simone 
• Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (ERR)
• C.G. Boerner
• Galerie van Diemen, 
• Dr. Otto Burchard, 
• J. Halle, 
• Old Art Antiques, 
• Flatow and Priemer,
• A. S. Drey
• Hans W. Lange
• Hans Wendland
• Walter Bornheim
• Eugene Thaw
• Henry Newman
• Rembrandt
• Charles Wrightsman
• 
  
• ...

1946: Alexander BALL listed in Enemy and Collaborationist Personnel Involved in Art Looting Recommended for Exclusion from the United States