Using Linked Data for Prosopographical Research of Historical Persons : Case U.S. Congress Legislators

This paper shows how biographical registries can be represented as Linked Data, enriched by data linking to related data sources, and used in Digital Humanities. As a use case, a database of 11 987 historical U.S. Congress Legislators in 1789–2018 was transformed into a knowledge graph. The data was published as a Linked Data service, including a SPARQL endpoint, on top of which tools for biographical and prosopographical research are implemented. A faceted browser named U.S. Congress Prosopographer with visualization tools for knowledge discovery is presented to provide new insights in political history.Peer reviewe

Integrating Historical Person Registers as Linked Open Data in the WarSampo Knowledge Graph

Semantic data integration from heterogeneous, distributed data silos enables Digital Humanities research and application development employing a larger, mutually enriched and interlinked knowledge graph. However, data integration is challenging, involving aligning the data models and reconciling the concepts and named entities, such as persons and places. This paper presents a record linkage process to reconcile person references in different military historical person registers with structured metadata. The information about persons is aggregated into a single knowledge graph. The process was applied to reconcile three person registers of the popular semantic portal "WarSampo -- Finnish World War 2 on the Semantic Web". The registers contain detailed information about some 100,000 people and are individually maintained by domain experts. Thus, the integration process needs to be automatic and adaptable to changes in the registers. An evaluation of the record linkage results is promising and provides some insight into military person register reconciliation in general.Peer reviewe

nlGis: A use case in linked historic geodata

While existing Linked Datasets provide detailed representations of Cultural Heritage objects, the locations where the objects originate from is often not accurately represented. Countries, municipalities, and excavation sites are commonly represented by geospatial points, and the fact that countries and municipalities change their geometry over time is not reflected in the data. We present nlGis, a collection of existing geo-historic datasets that are now published as Linked Open Data. The datasets in nlGis contain detailed geographic information about historic regions, with an emphasis on the Netherlands. We describe the creation of this Linked Geodataset and how it can be used to enrich Cultural Heritage data. We also distill several 'lessons learned' that can guide future attempts at publishing detailed Linked Geodata in the Cultural Heritage domain

ArCo: the Italian Cultural Heritage Knowledge Graph

ArCo is the Italian Cultural Heritage knowledge graph, consisting of a network of seven vocabularies and 169 million triples about 820 thousand cultural entities. It is distributed jointly with a SPARQL endpoint, a software for converting catalogue records to RDF, and a rich suite of documentation material (testing, evaluation, how-to, examples, etc.). ArCo is based on the official General Catalogue of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities (MiBAC) - and its associated encoding regulations - which collects and validates the catalogue records of (ideally) all Italian Cultural Heritage properties (excluding libraries and archives), contributed by CH administrators from all over Italy. We present its structure, design methods and tools, its growing community, and delineate its importance, quality, and impact

Evaluation of semantic web ontologies for modelling art collections

© 2017, Springer International Publishing AG. The need for organising, sharing and digitally processing Cultural Heritage (CH) information has led to the development of formal knowledge representation models (ontologies) for the CH domain. Based on RDF and OWL, the standard data model and ontology language of the Semantic Web, ontologies such as CIDOC-CRM, the Europeana Data Model and VRA, offer enhanced representation capabilities, but also support for inference, querying and interlinking through the Web. This paper presents the results of a small-scale evaluation of the three most commonly used CH ontologies, with respect to their capacity to fulfil the data modelling requirements of art collections

Maintaining a Linked Data Cloud and Data Service for Second World War History

One of the great promises of Linked Data is to provide a shared data infrastructure into which new data can be imported and aligned with, forming a sustainable, ever growing Linked Data Cloud (LDC). This paper studies and evaluates this idea in the context of the WarSampo LDC that provides a data infrastructure for Second World War related ontologies and data in Finland, including several mutually linked graphs, totaling ca 12 million triples. Two data integration case studies are presented, where the original WarSampo LDC and the related semantic portal were first extended by a dataset of hundreds of war cemeteries and thousands of photographs of them, and then by another dataset of over 4450 Finnish prisoners of war. As a conclusion, lessons learned are explicated, based on hands-on experience in maintaining the WarSampo LDC in a production environment.Peer reviewe

Mechanisms of polyamine catabolism-induced acute pancreatitis

Abstract Acute pancreatitis is an autodigestive disease, in which the pancreatic tissue is damaged by the digestive enzymes produced by the acinar cells. Among the tissues in the mammalian body, pancreas has the highest concentration of the natural polyamine, spermidine. We have found that pancreas is very sensitive to acute decreases in the concentrations of the higher polyamines, spermidine and spermine. Activation of polyamine catabolism in transgenic rats overexpressing SSAT (spermidine/spermine-N 1 -acetyltransferase) in the pancreas leads to rapid depletion of these polyamines and to acute necrotizing pancreatitis. Replacement of the natural polyamines with methylated polyamine analogues before the induction of acute pancreatitis prevents the development of the disease. As premature trypsinogen activation is a common, early event leading to tissue injury in acute pancreatitis in human and in experimental animal models, we studied its role in polyamine catabolism-induced pancreatitis. Cathepsin B, a lysosomal hydrolase mediating trypsinogen activation, was activated just 2 h after induction of SSAT. Pre-treatment of the rats with bismethylspermine prevented pancreatic cathepsin B activation. Analysis of tissue ultrastructure by transmission electron microscopy revealed early dilatation of rough endoplasmic reticulum, probable disturbance of zymogen packaging, appearance of autophagosomes and later disruption of intracellular membranes and organelles. Based on these results, we suggest that rapid eradication of polyamines from cellular structures leads to premature zymogen activation and autodigestion of acinar cells

Various spin-polarization states beyond the maximum-density droplet: a quantum Monte Carlo study

Using variational quantum Monte Carlo method, the effect of Landau-level mixing on the lowest-energy--state diagram of small quantum dots is studied in the magnetic field range where the density of magnetic flux quanta just exceeds the density of electrons. An accurate analytical many-body wave function is constructed for various angular momentum and spin states in the lowest Landau level, and Landau-level mixing is then introduced using a Jastrow factor. The effect of higher Landau levels is shown to be significant; the transition lines are shifted considerably towards higher values of magnetic field and certain lowest-energy states vanish altogether.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. Submitted to Phys. Rev.

New approaches to model and study social networks

We describe and develop three recent novelties in network research which are particularly useful for studying social systems. The first one concerns the discovery of some basic dynamical laws that enable the emergence of the fundamental features observed in social networks, namely the nontrivial clustering properties, the existence of positive degree correlations and the subdivision into communities. To reproduce all these features we describe a simple model of mobile colliding agents, whose collisions define the connections between the agents which are the nodes in the underlying network, and develop some analytical considerations. The second point addresses the particular feature of clustering and its relationship with global network measures, namely with the distribution of the size of cycles in the network. Since in social bipartite networks it is not possible to measure the clustering from standard procedures, we propose an alternative clustering coefficient that can be used to extract an improved normalized cycle distribution in any network. Finally, the third point addresses dynamical processes occurring on networks, namely when studying the propagation of information in them. In particular, we focus on the particular features of gossip propagation which impose some restrictions in the propagation rules. To this end we introduce a quantity, the spread factor, which measures the average maximal fraction of nearest neighbors which get in contact with the gossip, and find the striking result that there is an optimal non-trivial number of friends for which the spread factor is minimized, decreasing the danger of being gossiped.Comment: 16 Pages, 9 figure