DCH Session 6 Linked Open Data

Sunoikisis Digital Cultural Heritage, Fall 2019

Session 6. Linked Open Data

Thursday Nov 7, 16:00 UK = 17:00 CET

Convenors: Gabriel Bodard (Institute for Classical Studies), Paula Granados García (Open University), Matteo Romanello (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne)

YouTube link: https://youtu.be/J-owEagS3RY

Slides: http://tinyurl.com/yxjbldun

Session outline

1. The five stars of Linked Open Data and beyond
2. LOD theory, values & content negotiation
3. RDF & ontologies
4. Case study 1: CuCoO
5. Case study 2: HuCit
6. Introduction to Sparql and exercise

Seminar readings

• 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
• Daniel Pett, Ethan Gruber, Andrew Meadows, & David Wigg-Wolf (2014). "Semantic Web Technologies Applied to Numismatic Collections." Archaeology in the Digital Era: Papers from the 40th Annual Conference of Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA), Southampton, 26-29 March 2012. Available: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Semantic-Web-Technologies-Applied-to-Numismatic-Gruber-Heath/741cb5cb11642de94588a248273f574b0d6d3b3c

Further reading

• 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
• Hugh A. Cayless (2019). "Sustaining Linked Ancient World Data." In M. Berti (ed.), Digital Classical Philology: Ancient Greek and Latin in the Digital Revolution. De Gruyter. Available: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110599572-004
• Thomas Elliott, Sebastian Heath, John Muccigrosso (edd.), Current Practice in Linked Open Data for the Ancient World. ISAW Papers 7 (2014). Available: http://doi.org/2333.1/gxd256w7
• Stéphane Polis & Vincent Razanajao (2016). "Ancient Egyptian Texts in Context: Towards a conceptual data model (the Thos Data Model - TDM." In Digital Approaches and the Ancient World. Edd. G. Bodard, Y. Broux & S. Tarte. BICS 59.2, 24–41. Available: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2041-5370.2016.12036.x
• Matteo Romanello & Michele Pasin (2017). "Using Linked Open Data to Bootstrap a Knowledge Base of Classical Texts." 2nd Workshop on Humanities in the Semantic Web (WHiSe 2017). Available: http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2014/paper-01.pdf
• Keir Winesmith (2017), "Against Linked Open Data." Medium. Available: https://medium.com/@drkeir/against-linked-open-data-502a53b62fb7

Exercise

1. Go to the Epigraphic Database Heidelberg (EDH) and look at the RDF behind two or three inscriptions from different provinces. How much of the RDF can you understand (or guess at)?
2. Now go to the EDH Sparql endpoint and enter the sample searches from the presentation (some more examples here). Try to understand what the searches are returning.
3. Using your sense of the RDF structure from (1) above, come up with some new searches, combining those we have given you and the syntax you have learned, to explore the data. Can you, for example, output a list of the first 50 person names in inscriptions from the second century CE?
4. Now visit the Nomisma.org triplestore and explore their data. Using some of their sample Sparql queries and the knowledge you have acquired in the first few exercises, try to come up with some queries to explore their data a little more. Can you understand what is going on in the sample queries they provide?