Presentation at the AJL 2020 Digital Conference

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LOD4JS
Linked Open Data for
Jewish Studies
A DiJeSt Project
Yael Netzer,
Kepa Rodriguez,
Sinai Rusinek
The project DiJest was supported by Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe slides: https://bit.ly/ajl2020

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DiJeSt.net
DiJeSt Data: - becoming more connected!

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Catalogues as data
Traditional objectives of catalogues and authority files (among others):
- search a book, discover a book
- search by author, place, subject
- indexing the inventory
Catalogues are bodies of knowledge that change in time
Our objective and methodology:
Transfer catalogues/authority files into tables
Understand content as a whole
Inspect variations and unify values such as dates and place names
View information in additional perspectives: “distant reading” Digital Humanities concept
Derive new representations (e.g., Linked Open Data, maps)

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Reading Authority Files - People
Starting point: Israeli National Library authority file heb100.xml
July 2018 (marc/xml file)
203,771 Entities

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Reading Catalogues:
Bibliography of the Hebrew Book
Small sized (107977 records), comprehensive, importance (authority)
But:
messy, not machine readable
(names, dates, places etc.)
No mapping to the authority files of NLI:
We did it using OpenRefine

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Reading Authority File: Places
Connect place names in catalogue to place authority files, following
previous work on Kima (by Sinai Rusinek)

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Process
1. Identify relevant fields, subfields, indicators in marc(xml,json)from NLI
2. Map into columns using python code
3. Inspect with OpenRefine
4. Back to 1 until satisfied with results

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OpenRefine - A powerful tool
- Faceting and clustering
- Many knowledge representation formats
- Easy identification of errors and inconsistencies
- Built-in functions, possible usage of python (jython), closure
- Easy API calls, collect and add information
- Reconciliation with external, LOD resources
- Various exporting options, including generation of linked data (RDFs)
- Open source, resourceful community, FAIR principles
https://openrefine.org

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Collection as Data

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Data model: framework and ontologies (1)
When we designed our model, we decided:
● To make our data available for reuse: open data sharing policy.
● To make our data understandable for computers (machine-actionable).
● To make possible to navigate from our data to other resources.
● Expose our data as Linked Open Data (LOD).

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Data model: framework and ontologies (2)
LOD uses the Resource Description Framework (RDF) to describe the data as subject-predicate-object
triples.
● djr:book_152786 dcterms:creator djr:person_1403804
○ “The book with ID 152786 was created by the person with ID 1403804”
○ The author of “‫במלכודת‬ ‫”נערות‬ is Mordechai Narkis
We use standard ontologies to model our entity types.
That increases understandability for non-human agents.
● Authorities:
○ Person: skos, schema.org, dbpedia, rdaregistry, eac-cpf
○ Place: skos, schema.org, wgs84_pos
● Books:
○ Dublin core terms, fabio, GND, bibframe

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Data model: framework and ontologies (3)

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What can be done with it? eLinda
● http://tdk-p6.cs.technion.ac.il:8083/
● With Oren Mishali, Technion Data & Knowledge Lab (TD&K)
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Vision
Connect with other LOD resources:
Jewish Book Shelf
Judaica link
Wikidata
Epidat
Future projects:
Expand the model to also represent:
● Book copies - library holdings
● Book copies can be owned and censored
by people (Footprints)
● Works: model Ben Yehuda Project
● Places: model KIMA
Include authorities for Publishers and Printers (NLI)

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Kima
http://data.geo-kima.org/
and CartoDB to create an
interactive map of BHB

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label: ‫!תודה‬
alternativeLabel: !‫תודה‬
alternativeLabel: thank you!
http://dijest.net/
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