Amsterdamers from the Golden Age to the Information Age via Lenticular Lenses: Short paper

Abstract

The Golden Agents infrastructure project1closely collaborates with the Amsterdam CityArchives (SAA) to publish their digitized registries as Linked Open Data (LOD). In their AllAmsterdam Acts project2, the SAA digitizes/indexes all its notarial acts. For Golden Agents,studying the interactions between the production and consumption of the creative industriesof the Dutch Golden Age is relevant because the probate inventories, testaments, etc. in theseacts reveal the objects that families living in Amsterdam had in their houses. However, to linkthese data to other relevant collections we need to disambiguate names to identify individuals.This is a challenging task because (i) citizens in the Dutch Golden Age were not given anyidentification number; (ii) the information supplied in a single index do not suffice to uniquelyidentify an individual (weak identity criteria) and (iii) because of multiple occurrences of a sin-gle individual within an index. Here we discuss the requirements we identified for addressingthis challenge (Sect. 2); the Lenticular Lenses as an innovative context-sensitive entity linkingmethod (Idrissou et al., 2017) (Sect. 3) and our first experiments applying this tool for con-necting three SAA indexes (marriage, baptism and probate inventories) and two authoritativedatasets (Ecartico3and ULAN4) (Sect. 4