Madrid Linked Data for Digital Humanities

1. Linked Data for
Digital Humanities
Victor de Boer

2. About me
Victor de Boer
Assistant professor
Web & Media Group, Network Institute
VU University Amsterdam
Semantic Technologies, Linked Data
Cultural Heritage
Digital History
Linked Data for Development

3. What is Linked Data

4. http://info.cern.ch/Proposal.html
Tim Berners-Lee
(The inventor of the Web)

5. Web of Documents (WWW)
Linked Documents

6. From text to data > increased semantics

7. More and more structured data available online
Governments
Social web data
Medical data
Museums
Research data
?
Moverum.com

8. Web of Documents vs Web of Data
People are often not interested in documents,
they are interested in things (information)
Humans are very good at reading (web) documents
and distilling information
Computers are good at calculating, combining
and filtering information.
But they are very bad at reading documents
We need to help machines understand web data
Write it down in a way that they can understand
LINKED DATA!!

9. Web of Documents (WWW)
Linked Documents

10. Web of Data
Linked Data

11. http://info.cern.ch/Proposal.html
Tim Berners-Lee
(The inventor of the Web)
And the Semantic Web

12. What is Linked Open Data?

13. Open Data
is about licenses to allow reuse
Linked Data
is about technology for interoperability

14. www.w3.org/designissues/linkeddata.html

15. http://lod-cloud.net/

18. Google knowledge graph
www.huffingtonpost.com

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

20. How does all this work?
Data, not documents
Structured data
Graph (networked) data!
W3C Web standards stack
URIs, HTTP, RDF, RDFa, RDFS, OWL, SPARQL,
etc.

21. Four rules of Linked Data
1. Use URIs as names for things
2. Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up
those names.
3. When someone looks up a URI, provide useful
information, using the standards (RDF)
4. Include links to other URIs. so that they can
discover more things.
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html

22. Semantic Web standard for writing down data, information
(Subject, Relation, Object)
<Painting001, has_location, Amsterdam>
Resource Description Framework
(RDF)
Painting001 Amsterdam
has_location

24. Use HTTP URIs for Things
Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) is
a string of characters used to identify a name
of a resource
http://rijksmuseum.nl/data/schilderij1
I can go there (dereference) and then I get
information about it
HTML page for humans
RDF data for machines

25. Links
Link your data to other data
By establishing RDF triples that point to other
people’s data
By reusing other people’s URIs

26. Europeana

27. 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

28. 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

29. But what about the humanities?

30. Some examples

31. MultimediaN E-Culture project (2006)
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

32. E-Culture data cloud

33. 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

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

35. BiographyNet

36. 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

38. Interface for historians (mockup)

39. Het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden in de Tweede Wereldoorlog
History of German occupied Dutch society (1940-1945)
Published 1969 - 1991 in 14 volumes, 30 parts, 18.000 pages
1. Digitization
2. Open Data
3. Enriched access with Linked Data
E-History: Verrijkt Koninkrijk

40. Step 1: Lou de Jong’s “Het Koninkrijk” was digitized and made
available in a reusable format
Step 2: Named Entity Recognition and consolidation of the back-of-
the-book index provide structured vocabularies with links into the text
country, collection, doc-type, volume, chapter, section, sub-section, paragraph
Back-of-the-Book index Named Entities

41. Verrijkt Koninkrijk
Step 3: Enrichment with Linked Data makes new ways of
interaction and analysis possible
Back-of-the-Book index Named Entities

42. niod:Blitzkrieg
niod:oai_wo2_niod_nl_rec_102045
dct:subject
http://resolver.verrijktkoninkrijk.nl/nl.vk.d.reg.4.1386
botb:Blitzkrieg
skos:exactMatch

43. 43
National-
Socialist
29%
Social-
Democrat
21%
Protestant
13%
Liberal
12%
R-Catholic
12%
Communist
8%
Jewish
5%
http://semanticweb.cs.vu.nl/verrijktkoninkrijk/
http://search.loedejongdigitaal.nl/

44. Results are links to paragraphs

45. Hackathon shows re-usability

46. Dutch Ships and Sailors Project

47. The Problem:
((Maritime) historical) data is not integrated
• Researchers’ data is “lost”
– In different physical locations
– In different file formats
– In different semantic structures
• In a workshop, we identified 25+
maritime historical datasets.
– http://dutchshipsandsailors.nl
• We do not want to force one
monolithic data model for
integration

48. The solution: Linked Open Data
• Represent heterogeneous datasets
with their own data models
– In one data format (RDF)
– Link what can be linked to integrate at
project level (and beyond)
– Keep specificity of original data
• Links to other sources: re-use
knowledge
• Allow multiple levels of semantic
enrichment/ normalization
– through Named Graphs
– Provenance

49. What we did
1. Model four maritime historical datasets as
RDF
– Noordelijke Monsterrollen Database [J. Leinenga]
– Generale Zeemonsterrollen [M. van Rossum]
– Dutch Asiatic Shipping
– VOC Opvarenden
2. Link to each other (based on ships, ship types,
ranks, geography,…)
– Models and links evaluated by domain experts
1. Publish as Linked Open Data
2. Show how this data cloud can lead to new
types of integrated research questions

50. Links to Historical Newspapers
[HARLINGEN, 24 October.] …gestrand.
Tevens is het berigt ontvan°e > dat het hier
behoorende schoonerschip Transit,
kapitein Schaap, in de Noordzee is
gezonken, nadat het achterschip was
weggeslagen ; een ligtmatroos verloor
daarbij het leven. Mede zijn hier drie
vreemde schepen met meer en minder
zware averij binnengeloopen.
- Andrea Bravo Balado

51. DAS
GZMVOC
MDB
VOCOPV
Begunstig
den
VOCOPV
Soldijboek
en
PROV
AAT
VOCOPV
Opvaren
den
foaf
owl:sameAs
dss:hasKBLink
rdfs:subClassOf,
rdfs:subPropertyOf
dss:DAS link
skos :exactMatch

52. Data analysis and visualisation

53. http://dutchshipsandsailors.nl/data
Hands-on session tomorrow
fluxicon.comHands-onSessionProcessMiningnne12Apr

54. DIVE INTO THE EVENT-BASED
BROWSING OF LINKED HISTORICAL MEDIA

55. DIGITAL HUMANITIES RESEARCHERS
MediaresearcherLarsArveRøsslandoftheUniversityofBergen.(Photo:AndreasR.Graven)
EXPLORATIVE SEARCH
Digital Hermeneutics: The combination of digital
(Web) technology and theory of interpretation

57. DATA: OPENIMAGES.EU
Open videos Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision
~3000, mostly news broadcasts
Descriptions

58. DATA: DELPHER.NL
Scans of Radio bulletins (hand annotated)
1937 – 1984
1.5 Million OCR’ed and NErred

59. ENTITY EXTRACTION
CROWDTRUTH.ORG
ENTITY EXTRACTION
EVENTS CROWDSOURCING AND LINKING TO
CONCEPTS THROUGH CROWDTRUTH.ORG
SEGMENTATION & KEYFRAMES
LINKING EVENTS AND
CONCEPTS TO KEYFRAMES

60. SIMPLE EVENT MODEL (SEM),
OPENANNOTATION (OA) AND SKOS
DIVE:MEDIA OBJECT SEM:EVENT
SEM:PLACE
SEM:TIME
SEM:ACTOR
SKOS:CONCEPT
OA:ANNOTATION
LINKS TO EUROPEANA (MULTILINGUAL)
LINKS TO DBPEDIA

61. DIGITAL SUBMARINE UI
https://www.flickr.com/photos/benjcarson/245171885
https://www.flickr.com/photos/mibuchat/2774251415
INFINITY OF EXPLORATION

62. DEMO
DIVE.BEELDENGELUID.NL

63. Linked Data allows for new types
of Humanities research
• Integrate datasets
• Without the need to force everything into one datamodel
• Retain original model and intent, reuse another day
• New research questions (but at which level?)
• Re-use background knowledge
• Common-sense or very specific
• Digital hermeneutics
• Provenance fits very well
• Linked Data is the (technically) best way to publish and share
your research data

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