Keynote presentation for CSWS 2013 Conference in Shanghai, China. Some slides borrowed from Jan Wielemaker, Guus Schreiber, Jacco van Ossenbruggen, Niels Ockeloen, Antske Fokkens, Serge ter Braake.

1. Linked Data for
Digital Heritage
and History
Victor de Boer
VU University Amsterdam
Keynote CSWS 2013 Shanghai

2. 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

3. 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

4. The evolution of Science
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek’s
microscope (17th C.)
Large Hadron Collider in
Switzerland (21th C.)

5. 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

6. OpenPhacts explorer
http://www.openphacts.org/

8. But what about the humanities?

9. Cultural Heritage

10. 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

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

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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

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

16. Amsterdam Museum
as Linked Open Data

17. 17

18. 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

19. 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

20. 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

21. ClioPatria.swi-prolog.org
ClioPatria is powered by

22. XMLRDF rewriting rules examples

23. Mapping to popular vocabularies
am:obj_22093 “Job Cohen”
am:contentPersonName
rdfs:subPropertyOf
dcterms:subject

24. Amalgame alignment platform
• Semi-automatic
linking
– Simple automatic
techniques,
– chained together by
hand
• Transparent and
interactive

25. Amsterdam Museum als Linked Open Data
http://thedatahub.org/dataset/amsterdam-museum-as-edm-lod

26. E-history
(digital history)

27. BiographyNet

28. (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

29. 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

30. Johan Rudolph Thorbecke werd
in 1798 geboren op 14 januari
in Zwolle en komt uit een half-Duit
Johan Rudolph Thorbecke werd
in 1798 geboren op 14 januari
in Zwolle en komt uit een half-Duit
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
Johan Rudolph Thorbecke werd
in 1798 geboren op 14 januari
in Zwolle en komt uit een half-Duit
Zwolle
1798-01-14

31. 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

32. Verrijkt Koninkrijk

33. 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 )

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

35. Back of the Book Vocabulary
+
Named Entity Vocabulary
SKOS vocabularies as stepping stones

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

37. 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

38. skos:exactMatch
skos:exactMatch

39. 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

40. 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

41. Results are links to paragraphs

42. 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

43. Dutch Ships and Sailors

44. gz:Mercuur
1782
gz:Buijksloot
gz:Batavia
gz:Claas Roem
voc:Claas Roem
voc:Buijksloot
1752das:Mercuur
das:Departure
das:Roem, Klaas
19-12-1780 das:Texel
das:Arrival
20-7-1781 das:Batavia
das:Voyage1
Web of Data

45. DataLab

46. Lessons Learned

47. Be humble, transparent and
interactive in your data
conversion and linking
Lessons Learned

48. Lessons Learned
Retain complexities of the
data and establish layers
of interoperability

49. Lessons Learned
A Little Semantics goes a
Long Way…and so does
a small amount of links

50. Lessons Learned
Make sure your solutions
and tools fit the
methodology of the field

51. Lessons Learned
Show added benefit for
scientific research and
(unexpected) re-use

52. Lessons Learned
Linked Data is a good fit
for Humanities research

53. Thank you!
Victor de Boer
http://victordeboer.com
v.de.boer@vu.nl

54. 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