Linking Dutch civil certificates

Abstract

Finding and linking different appearances of the same entity in an open Web setting is one of the primary challenges of the Semantic Web. In social and economic history, record linkage has dealt with this problem for a long time, linking historical individual records at a local database level. With the advent of semantic technologies, Knowledge Graphs containing these records have been published, raising the need for large-scale linking techniques that consider the particularities of historical individual linking. In this paper we focus on our current investigation of such techniques to link the Dutch civil certificates in the LINKS/CLARIAH project. We describe the production of the LINKS Knowledge Graph, and we show its potential at answering domain research questions through its large number of owl:sameAs links