Keynote csws2013

Linked Data for Digital Heritage and History

Victor de Boer

VU University Amsterdam Keynote CSWS 2013 Shanghai

About me

Victor de Boer

Assistant professor at VU University Amsterdam

Domain-driven Semantic Technologies, Linked Data

Cultural Heritage

Digital History

Linked Data for Development

Linked Data is ``a term used to describe a recommended best practice for exposing, sharing, and connecting pieces of data, information, and knowledge on the Semantic Web using URIs and RDF.’’ --Wikipedia

The evolution of Science

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek’s microscope (17th C.)

Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland (21th C.)

Why Linked Data for E-science

Large amounts of data

Efficient analysis, data mining

Sharing data, information and knowledge between scientists

Across continents

Across disciplines

OpenPhacts explorer

http://www.openphacts.org/

But what about the humanities?

Cultural Heritage

MultimediaN E-Culture project

• Museums have increasingly nice websites • But: most of them are driven by stand-alone collection

databases

• Data is isolated, both syntactically and semantically

• If users can do cross-collection search, the individual collections become more valuable!

• Semantic Search

http://e-culture.multimedian.nl/




Search for objects which are linked via concepts (semantic link)

China

Kanton

PartOf

Query “China”

Use the type of semantic link to provide meaningful presentation of the search results

Rijksmuseum: View of Canton, with two Dutch ships

Semantic Search

Vocabulary alignment

• In large virtual collections there are always multiple vocabularies with its own perspective – In multiple languages – You can’t just merge them

• But you can use vocabularies

jointly by defining a limited set of links

• It is surprising what you can

do with just a few links

Vocabulary alignment

“Easel-pieces”

RMA concept “Schilderij”

RMA is the thesaurus of Rijksmuseum

AAT artefact type “Easel Piece” “Painting”

AAT is Getty’s Art & Architecture Thesaurus

Amsterdam Museum as Linked Open Data

Amsterdam Museum

• Formerly Amsterdam Historic Museum – “The rich collection of works of art,

objects and archaeological finds brings to life the fortunes of Amsterdammers of days gone by and today.”

• In March 2010 published their whole collection online – 70.000 objects

– CC license

Requirements for conversion and linking

• Transparent conversion and linking of the data – Use of provenance and

reproducibility

• keep original complexities of the data

• while making it interoperable with other (Europeana) data

• Retain the relation to original data

19

Methods

ClioPatria

XMLRDF

1. XML ingestion (OAI)

2. Direct transformation to ‘crude’ RDF

3. Interactive RDF restructuring

4. Create a metadata mapping schema

5. Align vocabularies with external sources

6. Publish as Linked Data

Amalgame

Tools

ClioPatria.swi-prolog.org

ClioPatria is powered by

XMLRDF rewriting rules examples

Mapping to popular vocabularies

am:obj_22093 “Job Cohen” am:contentPersonName

rdfs:subPropertyOf

dcterms:subject

Amalgame alignment platform

• Semi-automatic linking – Simple automatic

techniques,

– chained together by hand

• Transparent and interactive

Amsterdam Museum als Linked Open Data

http://thedatahub.org/dataset/amsterdam-museum-as-edm-lod











E-history (digital history)

BiographyNet

(Narrative) historical methodology

• Historical facts derived mainly from archival findings and existing literature

• Historians put them together into a narrative/synthesis.

– The Narrative: a historical synthesis which can not be

scientifically proven (only made likely) based on facts which can be proven or falsified. There is necessarily a creative element in drawing up a narrative

Slides by BiographyNet team

Where do eScience and Biographical History meet?

• Quantitative analyses of a larger group of people (prosopography). Surpassing the anecdotal.

• Finding relations/networks

between people which are otherwise hard to detect

Johan Rudolph Thorbecke werd in 1798 geboren op 14 januari in Zwolle en komt uit een half-Duitse…


Linked Data for BiograpyNet

Thorbecke

Biographical Description

Provenance Meta Data

NNBW

Person Meta Data

“Thorbecke”

Biography Parts

Birth 1798

Event

Biographical Description

Enrichment NLP Tool

Person Meta Data

Event Birth


Zwolle 1798-01-14

Prototype under development

The information provided by the first system can

be used to:

1. Identify alternative descriptions of events (same time, location and/or participants)

2. Identify relations between events (same locations & time, consequent events, same participants, etc.)

3. Initial networks of people

http://www.biographynet.nl

http://www.biographynet.nl/

Verrijkt Koninkrijk

History of German occupied Dutch society (1940-1945) Published between 1969 and 1991 in 14 volumes, 30 parts, 18.000 pages 1. Digitization, 2. Open Data, 3. Enriched access with Linked Open Data

Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog

(The Kingdom of the Netherlands During World War II )

country, collection, doc-type, volume, chapter, section, sub-section, paragraph

Back of the Book Vocabulary +

Named Entity Vocabulary

SKOS vocabularies as stepping stones

http://semanticweb.cs.vu.nl/verrijktkoninkrijk/

niod:Blitzkrieg

niod:parRef

niod:oai_wo2_niod_nl_rec_102045 dct:subject

http://resolver.verrijktkoninkrijk.nl/nl.vk.d.reg.4.1386

botb:Blitzkrieg

skos:exactMatch

skos:exactMatch

skos:exactMatch

botb:sjanghai

dbpedianl:sjanghai

dbpedia:sjanghai

owl:sameAs

Шанхай

Thượng Hải

上海市

Xangai

Šanghaj

Shanghai

Shanghai

rdfs:label

dbpedia:

Shanghai_Jiao_Tong_University

dbp:is_city_of

SELECT * WHERE

{ ?s skos:prefLabel ?pl.

?s skos:closeMatch ?geo.

?geo gn:parentADM1 ?prov.

?prov gn:name ?provname.

?s niod:pageRef ?pref. }

0

2000

4000

6000

8000

10000

12000

NE index

BotB index

Geographical analysis using background knowledge from

GeoNames

Results are links to paragraphs

SPARQL for R

National-Socialist

29%

Social-Democrat

21% Protestant

13%

Liberal 12%

R-Catholic 12%

Communist 8%

Jewish 5%

Pillar1 Pillar2 Co

Liber. Protestant 0.29

Protestant R-Cath. 0.22

Liber. R-Cath. 0.21

Comm Soc-dem 0.20

Liber. Soc-dem 0.15

Dutch Ships and Sailors

gz:Mercuur

1782

gz:Buijksloot

gz:Batavia

gz:Claas Roem

voc:Claas Roem

voc:Buijksloot

1752 das:Mercuur

das:Departure

das:Roem, Klaas

19-12-1780 das:Texel

das:Arrival

20-7-1781 das:Batavia

das:Voyage1

Web of Data

DataLab

Lessons Learned

Be humble, transparent and interactive in your data conversion and linking

Lessons Learned

Lessons Learned

Retain complexities of the data and establish layers of interoperability

Lessons Learned

A Little Semantics goes a Long Way…and so does a small amount of links

Lessons Learned

Make sure your solutions and tools fit the methodology of the field

Lessons Learned

Show added benefit for scientific research and (unexpected) re-use

Lessons Learned

Linked Data is a good fit for Humanities research

Thank you!

Victor de Boer

http://victordeboer.com [email protected]

http://victordeboer.com/

mailto:[email protected]

Image credits

• Wikipedia lemmas • Flickr images (cc-licensed)

– RMTip21 – Argonne National Laboratory – thegarethwiscombe

• “Linking Open Data cloud diagram, by Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch. http://lod-cloud.net/” • http://blogs.voanews.com/science-world/tag/cern/ • Gezicht op Canton, Vingboons-atlas, Bussum 1981, p. 35 VOC Kenniscentrum

Links

• http://semanticweb.cs.vu.nl

• http://biographynet.nl

• http://e-culture.multimedian.nl

• http://cliopatria.swi-prolog.org

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rmtip21/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/argonne/




http://lod-cloud.net/



http://blogs.voanews.com/science-world/tag/cern/



http://semanticweb.cs.vu.nl/

http://biographynet.nl/




http://cliopatria.swi-prolog.org/



Keynote csws2013

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