Getting only english property value - sparql

Question

I am trying to get a list countries including the english short names:
# get a list countries with the corresponding ISO code
PREFIX rdfs: <http://www.w3.org/2000/01/rdf-schema#>
PREFIX wd: <http://www.wikidata.org/entity/>
PREFIX wdt: <http://www.wikidata.org/prop/direct/>
PREFIX wikibase: <http://wikiba.se/ontology#>
SELECT ?country ?countryLabel ?shortName (MAX(?pop) as ?population) ?coord ?isocode
WHERE
{
# instance of country
?country wdt:P31 wd:Q3624078.
OPTIONAL {
?country rdfs:label ?countryLabel filter (lang(?countryLabel) = "en").
}
OPTIONAL {
# https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P1813
?country wdt:P1813 ?shortName.
}
OPTIONAL {
# get the population
# https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P1082
?country wdt:P1082 ?pop.
}
# get the iso countryCode
{ ?country wdt:P297 ?isocode }.
# get the coordinate
OPTIONAL { ?country wdt:P625 ?coord }.
}
GROUP BY ?country ?countryLabel ?shortName ?population ?coord ?isocode
ORDER BY ?countryLabel
try it!
Unfortunately also flags and non english versions of "shortName" are returned. I tried using a subquery but that timed out. I'd like to avoid using the wikibase label service since I need to run the query on my local wikidata copy which uses Apache Jena
How could i get the english shortnames of countries? E.g. China for People's republic of china and USA for United States of America?

Answer 1

There are two issues here:
we need to filter for the English short names only, i.e. we need a filter (lang(?shortName) = "en") clause inside the second OPTIONAL pattern
for some reason, there are some flags having an English language tag, so we have to ignore those somehow - the good thing, there is a statement qualifier that helps here: an instance of (P31) relation to the Wikidata entity emoji flag sequence (Q28840786)
So, overall, we replace
OPTIONAL {
# https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P1813
?country wdt:P1813 ?shortName.
}
by
OPTIONAL {
?country p:P1813 ?shortNameStmt. # get the short name statement
?shortNameStmt ps:P1813 ?shortName # the the short name value from the statement
filter (lang(?shortName) = "en") # filter for English short names only
filter not exists {?shortNameStmt pq:P31 wd:Q28840786} # ignore flags (aka emojis)
}
Still, there will be multiple entries for some countries because of multiple short names. One way to workaround this is to use some aggregate function like sample or min/max and pick just a single short name per country.