Session 6. Linked Open Data for Cultural Heritage

Date: Thursday, November 8, 2018, 16h00 (UK time)

Session coordinators: Gabriel Bodard, Valeria Vitale (University of London), Hugh Cayless (Duke), Tom Elliott (ISAW), Andrew Meadows, Jonathan Prag (Oxford), Charlotte Tupman (Exeter)

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/HqGUNqQ5JqU

Slides:

Outline

• Introduction to Linked Open data for the Ancient World: The semantic Web, URIs and lists of authorities, triples and the RDF format, ontologies
• NOMISMA: Tools and strategies for large scale data integration
• SNAP:DRGN: Connecting communities of users
• PELAGIOS: The lightweight approach to LOD and the Open Annotation format
• EPIGRAPHIC ONTOLOGY: using and combing different ontologies, and creating new ones

Required reading

• Bodard, G., Cayless, H., Depauw, M., Isaksen, L., Lawrence, F., & Rahtz, S. (2017). Standards for networking ancient person data: digital approaches to problems in prosopographical space. Available: https://journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/index.php/dco/article/viewFile/37975/35966
• Noble, Keir, Against Linked Open Data (2017). (available: https://medium.com/@drkeir/against-linked-open-data-502a53b62fb7)

Further reading

• Isaksen, Leif, Rainer Simon, Elton T. E. Barker, and Pau de Soto Canamares, "Pelagios and the emerging graph of ancient world data." In: WebSci ’14: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM conference on Web science, ACM (2014), pp. 197–201. (available: http://oro.open.ac.uk/43658/1/2014_Isaksen_Barker_etal_Pelagios_WebSci.pdf)
• Berners-Lee, Tim, Linked Data, 2006. (available: https://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html)
• Blaney, Jonathan, "Introduction to the Principles of Linked Open Data." In The Programming Historian (2017). (available: https://programminghistorian.org/lessons/intro-to-linked-data)
• Linked Data: Guides and Tutorials: http://linkeddata.org/guides-and-tutorials

Essay title

Compare the benefits and limitations of the light-weight approach to Linked Open Data with more complex and detailed models such as, for example, the CIDOC-CRM. What does each of them offer in terms of usability, accuracy and longer-term preservation, especially in the field of classical studies?

Exercise

1. Choose one of the LOD projects we discussed, and perform a dozen queries via their search interfaces, according to your own research interests. Try to differentiate your approach searching, for example, for dates, places, types of objects and keywords. Analyse the results, trying different filters (for example by area, by period, or by provenance). Do you notice any trend in the data? Do you think they may suggest some phenomenon that could be further investigated? What kind of information would you have liked to query but was not available?

2. Choose a short text and identify all the references to people and/or places. Following the guidelines of the simple LAWD ontology, try to express what you know (or don’t know) about those people and places in RDF format. Don't forget to disambiguate the entities against lists of authorities (like VIAF for people or Pleiades for places). Feel free to use other ontologies in combination, or to mint mock new relationships, if you can’t find what you need in the existing ontologies, but remember to name your new mock ontology and use the chosen prefix consistently. As an alternative, you can try describing a number of ancient artefacts.