Linked Open Data Vocabularies and Identifiers for Medieval Studies

This paper examines the use of Linked Open Data in the research field of medieval studies. We report on a survey of common identifiers and vocabularies used across digitized medieval resources, with a focus on three internationally significant collections in the field. This survey has been undertaken within the “Mapping Manuscript Migrations” (MMM) project since 2017, aimed at aggregating and linking disparate datasets relating to the history of medieval manuscripts. This has included reconciliation and matching of data for five main classes of entities: Persons, Places, Organizations, Works, and Manuscripts. For each of these classes, we review the identifiers used in MMM’s source datasets, and note the way in which they tend to rely on generic vocabularies rather than specialist medieval ones. As well as discussing some of the major issues and difficulties involved in conceptualizing each of these types of entity in a medieval context, we suggest some possible directions for building a more specialized Linked Open Data environment for medieval studies in the future.Peer reviewe

Report of the Stanford Linked Data Workshop

The Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (SULAIR) with the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) conducted at week-long workshop on the prospects for a large scale, multi-national, multi-institutional prototype of a Linked Data environment for discovery of and navigation among the rapidly, chaotically expanding array of academic information resources. As preparation for the workshop, CLIR sponsored a survey by Jerry Persons, Chief Information Architect emeritus of SULAIR that was published originally for workshop participants as background to the workshop and is now publicly available. The original intention of the workshop was to devise a plan for such a prototype. However, such was the diversity of knowledge, experience, and views of the potential of Linked Data approaches that the workshop participants turned to two more fundamental goals: building common understanding and enthusiasm on the one hand and identifying opportunities and challenges to be confronted in the preparation of the intended prototype and its operation on the other. In pursuit of those objectives, the workshop participants produced:1. a value statement addressing the question of why a Linked Data approach is worth prototyping;2. a manifesto for Linked Libraries (and Museums and Archives and …);3. an outline of the phases in a life cycle of Linked Data approaches;4. a prioritized list of known issues in generating, harvesting & using Linked Data;5. a workflow with notes for converting library bibliographic records and other academic metadata to URIs;6. examples of potential “killer apps” using Linked Data: and7. a list of next steps and potential projects.This report includes a summary of the workshop agenda, a chart showing the use of Linked Data in cultural heritage venues, and short biographies and statements from each of the participants

Applying Semantic Web Technologies to Medieval Manuscript Research

Medieval manuscript research is a complex, fragmented, multilingual field of knowledge, which is difficult to navigate, analyse and exploit. Though printed sources are still of great importance and value to researchers, there are now many services on the Web, some commercial and many in the public domain. At present, these services have to be consulted separately and individually. They employ a range of different descriptive standards and vocabularies, and use a variety of technologies to make their information available on the Web. This chapter proposes a new approach to organizing the international collaborative infrastructure for interlinking knowledge and research about medieval European manuscripts, based on technologies associated with the Semantic Web and the Linked Data movement. This collaborative infrastructure will be an open space on the Web where information about medieval manuscripts can be shared, stored, exchanged and updated for research purposes. It will be possible to ask large-scale research questions across the virtual global manuscript collection, in a quicker and more effective way than has ever been feasible in the past. The proposed infrastructure will focus on building links between data and will provide the basis for new kinds of services which exploit these data. It will not aim to impose a single metadata standard on existing manuscript services, but will build on existing databases and vocabularies. The article describes the architecture, services and data which will comprise this infrastructure, and discusses strategies for making th challenging and exciting goal a reality

Sharing humanities data for e-research: conceptual and technical issues

The humanities, as defined by the Australian Academy of the Humanities, encompass the following disciplines: Archaeology; Asian Studies; Classical Studies; English; European Languages and Cultures; History; Linguistics; Philosophy, Religion and the History of Ideas; Cultural and Communication Studies; the Arts. Researchers in some of these fields employ quantitative and qualitative methodologies similar to those used in the sciences and social sciences, but most research in the humanities is perceived as distinctive and different from research in other fields, both in its methodologies and in its approach to data. Archiving and sharing humanities data for reuse by other researchers is crucial in the development and application of e-research in the humanities. There has been considerable debate about the applicability of e-research in the humanities, particularly around the relevance of programmes to digitize source materials on a large scale. Conceptualized and designed properly, however, a humanities data archive can provide the platform on which data-intensive e-research can be based, and to which e-research processes and tools can be applied. This paper looks at the distinctive characteristics of humanities data, and examines how various models of the humanities research process help in understanding the meaning of 'data' in the humanities. It reviews existing services and approaches to building data archives and e-research services for the humanities, and the assumptions they make about the nature of data. It also analyses some conceptual and technical frameworks which could serve as the basis for future developments, focusing particularly on the place of Linked Open Data in building large-scale humanities e-research environments.PARADISEC (Pacific And Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures), Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories, Ethnographic E-Research Project and Sydney Object Repositories for Research and Teaching

Sharing humanities data for e-research: conceptual and technical issues

The humanities, as defined by the Australian Academy of the Humanities, encompass the following disciplines: Archaeology; Asian Studies; Classical Studies; English; European Languages and Cultures; History; Linguistics; Philosophy, Religion and the History of Ideas; Cultural and Communication Studies; the Arts. Researchers in some of these fields employ quantitative and qualitative methodologies similar to those used in the sciences and social sciences, but most research in the humanities is perceived as distinctive and different from research in other fields, both in its methodologies and in its approach to data. Archiving and sharing humanities data for reuse by other researchers is crucial in the development and application of e-research in the humanities. There has been considerable debate about the applicability of e-research in the humanities, particularly around the relevance of programmes to digitize source materials on a large scale. Conceptualized and designed properly, however, a humanities data archive can provide the platform on which data-intensive e-research can be based, and to which e-research processes and tools can be applied. This paper looks at the distinctive characteristics of humanities data, and examines how various models of the humanities research process help in understanding the meaning of 'data' in the humanities. It reviews existing services and approaches to building data archives and e-research services for the humanities, and the assumptions they make about the nature of data. It also analyses some conceptual and technical frameworks which could serve as the basis for future developments, focusing particularly on the place of Linked Open Data in building large-scale humanities e-research environments.PARADISEC (Pacific And Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures), Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories, Ethnographic E-Research Project and Sydney Object Repositories for Research and Teaching

Mapping Manuscript Migrations: Building and Using a Linked Open Data Environment for Medieval and Renaissance Manuscript Studies

“Mapping Manuscript Migrations” is a digital humanities project that brings together three distinct data sets about the histories of more than 215,000 medieval and Renaissance manuscripts for browsing, searching, and visualization. Four leading institutions from Great Britain, France, Finland, and the United States collaborated on this project, pooling their expertise in Semantic Web technologies and medieval manuscript curation and research, as well as contributing their own data from the three contrasting datasets. The Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania, the Medieval Manuscripts Catalogue at the University of Oxford, and the Bibale database from the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes--are brought together in a Linked Open Data environment, constructed by the team members from the e-Research Centre at the University of Oxford and the Semantic Computing Group at Aalto University in Finland, to aggregate, enhance, and present the data, with a data model based on the CIDOC-CRM and FRBROO ontologies. While also considering the challenges and successes of this international collaboration, Dr Lynn Ransom (Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, University of Pennsylvania) will show how the project builds on the data and functionality of the source datasets and enables new approaches to research in manuscript history and provenance

The ‘PAThs’ Project: An Effort to Represent the Physical Dimension of Coptic Literary Production (Third–Eleventh centuries)

PAThs – Tracking Papyrus and Parchment Paths: An Archaeological Atlas of Coptic Literature. Literary Texts in their Geographical Context. Production, Copying, Usage, Dissemination and Storage is an ambitious digital project based in Rome, working towards a new historical and archaeological geography of the Coptic literary tradition. This aim implies a number of auxiliary tasks and challenges, including classification of authors, works, titles, colophons, and codicological units, as well as the study and wherever possible exact mapping of the relevant geographical sites related to the production, circulation, and storage of manuscript

Harmonizing and publishing heterogeneous premodern manuscript metadata as Linked Open Data

Manuscripts are a crucial form of evidence for research into all aspects of premodern European history and culture, and there are numerous databases devoted to describing them in detail. This descriptive information, however, is typically available only in separate data silos based on incompatible data models and user interfaces. As a result, it has been difficult to study manuscripts comprehensively across these various platforms. To address this challenge, a team of manuscript scholars and computer scientists worked to create "Mapping Manuscript Migrations" (MMM), a semantic portal, and a Linked Open Data service. MMM stands as a successful proof of concept for integrating distinct manuscript datasets into a shared platform for research and discovery with the potential for future expansion. This paper will discuss the major products of the MMM project: a unified data model, a repeatable data transformation pipeline, a Linked Open Data knowledge graph, and a Semantic Web portal. It will also examine the crucial importance of an iterative process of multidisciplinary collaboration embedded throughout the project, enabling humanities researchers to shape the development of a digital platform and tools, while also enabling the same researchers to ask more sophisticated and comprehensive research questions of the aggregated data.Peer reviewe

SUMMARY OF PROCEEDINGS OF THE “LINKING THE MIDDLE AGES” WORKSHOP (MAY 11-12, 2015) at the University of Texas at Austin

Summary of Proceedings of Workshop on the possible application(s) of Linked Open Data to Medieval Studies.In May 2015 the CLIR/Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellows in Medieval Data Curation convened a two-day workshop on the sharing and publishing of linked open data (LOD). Funded by a CLIR/Mellon microgrant, the workshop brought together librarians, technologists, and scholars to exchange ideas on the challenges posed to medievalists in sharing data on digital platforms. More than thirty experts took part in the workshop, which was held at The University of Texas at Austin on May 11-12, 2015. Participants presented their work in linked open data operational sites and took part in discussions about the obstacles and opportunities of LOD in three areas: research, teaching, and publication. This paper documents the possibilities and problems of applying LOD in medieval studies. It focuses specifically on its application to the field’s data, which requires medievalists to work together with librarians and technologists, and considers a technical infrastructure that can maintain and proliferate this type of collaborative work.Council on Library and Information Resources, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, University of Texas Libraries, University of Texas at AustinUT Librarie

Towards Resolution Services for Text URIs

In this paper we address the lack of fully resolvable URIs for texts and their citable units in the currently emerging Graph of Ancient World Data. We identify three main architectural components that are required to provide resolution services for text URIs: 1) a registry of text services; 2) an identifier resolution service; 3) a document metadata scheme, to represent the relations between texts in the registry, as well as between these texts and related external resources (e.g. library catalogues). After presenting some of the use cases a central registry providing resolvable URIs for texts would enable, we discuss in detail each component. We conclude by considering three examples where the proposed document metadata scheme is used to describe digital texts; this scheme contains a minimum yet extendable set of metadata that can be used to explore and aggregate texts coming from a network of distributed repositories