Using linked open data to enhance the discoverability, functionality and impact of Emblematica Online

2017 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 159-178
Author(s):  
Timothy W. Cole ◽  
Myung-Ja K. Han ◽  
Maria Janina Sarol ◽  
Monika Biel ◽  
David Maus

Purpose Early Modern emblem books are primary sources for scholars studying the European Renaissance. Linked Open Data (LOD) is an approach for organizing and modeling information in a data-centric manner compatible with the emerging Semantic Web. The purpose of this paper is to examine ways in which LOD methods can be applied to facilitate emblem resource discovery, better reveal the structure and connectedness of digitized emblem resources, and enhance scholar interactions with digitized emblem resources. Design/methodology/approach This research encompasses an analysis of the existing XML-based Spine (emblem-specific) metadata schema; the design of a new, domain-specific, Resource Description Framework compatible ontology; the mapping and transformation of metadata from Spine to both the new ontology and (separately) to the pre-existing Schema.org ontology; and the (experimental) modification of the Emblematica Online portal as a proof of concept to illustrate enhancements supported by LOD. Findings LOD is viable as an approach for facilitating discovery and enhancing the value to scholars of digitized emblem books; however, metadata must first be enriched with additional uniform resource identifiers and the workflow upgrades required to normalize and transform existing emblem metadata are substantial and still to be fully worked out. Practical implications The research described demonstrates the feasibility of transforming existing, special collections metadata to LOD. Although considerable work and further study will be required, preliminary findings suggest potential benefits of LOD for both users and libraries. Originality/value This research is unique in the context of emblem studies and adds to the emerging body of work examining the application of LOD best practices to library special collections.

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 363-378
Author(s):  
Sigal Arie Erez ◽  
Tobias Blanke ◽  
Mike Bryant ◽  
Kepa Rodriguez ◽  
Reto Speck ◽  
...  

Purpose This paper aims to describe the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) project's ongoing efforts to virtually integrate trans-national archival sources via the reconstruction of collection provenance as it relates to copy collections (material copied from one archive to another) and the co-referencing of subject and authority terms across material held by distinct institutions. Design/methodology/approach This paper is a case study of approximately 6,000 words length. The authors describe the scope of the problem of archival fragmentation from both cultural and technical perspectives, with particular focus on Holocaust-related material, and describe, with graph-based visualisations, two ways in which EHRI seeks to better integrate information about fragmented material. Findings As a case study, the principal contributions of this paper include reports on our experience with extracting provenance-based connections between archival descriptions from encoded finding aids and the challenges of co-referencing access points in the absence of domain-specific controlled vocabularies. Originality/value Record linking in general is an important technique in computational approaches to humanities research and one that has rightly received significant attention from scholars. In the context of historical archives, however, the material itself is in most cases not digitised, meaning that computational attempts at linking must rely on finding aids which constitute much fewer rich data sources. The EHRI project’s work in this area is therefore quite pioneering and has implications for archival integration on a larger scale, where the disruptive potential of Linked Open Data is most obvious.


2014 ◽  
Vol 32 (6) ◽  
pp. 834-851 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikolaos Konstantinou ◽  
Dimitrios-Emmanuel Spanos ◽  
Nikos Houssos ◽  
Nikolaos Mitrou

Purpose – This paper aims to introduce a transformation engine which can be used to convert an existing institutional repository installation into a Linked Open Data repository. Design/methodology/approach – The authors describe how the data that exist in a DSpace repository can be semantically annotated to serve as a Semantic Web (meta)data repository. Findings – The authors present a non-intrusive, standards-compliant approach that can run alongside with current practices, while incorporating state-of-the art methodologies. Originality/value – Also, they propose a set of mappings between domain vocabularies that can be (re)used towards this goal, thus offering an approach that covers both the technical and semantic aspects of the procedure.


2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Hsin-Chang Yang ◽  
Chung-Hong Lee ◽  
Wen-Sheng Liao

PurposeMeasuring the similarity between two resources is considered difficult due to a lack of reliable information and a wide variety of available information regarding the resources. Many approaches have been devised to tackle such difficulty. Although content-based approaches, which adopted resource-related data in comparing resources, played a major role in similarity measurement methodology, the lack of semantic insight on the data may leave these approaches imperfect. The purpose of this paper is to incorporate data semantics into the measuring process.Design/methodology/approachThe emerged linked open data (LOD) provide a practical solution to tackle such difficulty. Common methodologies consuming LOD mainly focused on using link attributes that provide some sort of semantic relations between data. In this work, methods for measuring semantic distances between resources using information gathered from LOD were proposed. Such distances were then applied to music recommendation, focusing on the effect of various weight and level settings.FindingsThis work conducted experiments using the MusicBrainz dataset and evaluated the proposed schemes for the plausibility of LOD on music recommendation. The experimental result shows that the proposed methods electively improved classic approaches for both linked data semantic distance (LDSD) and PathSim methods by 47 and 9.7%, respectively.Originality/valueThe main contribution of this work is to develop novel schemes for incorporating knowledge from LOD. Two types of knowledge, namely attribute and path, were derived and incorporated into similarity measurements. Such knowledge may reflect the relationships between resources in a semantic manner since the links in LOD carry much semantic information regarding connecting resources.


2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nelson Piedra ◽  
Edmundo Tovar ◽  
Ricardo Colomo-Palacios ◽  
Jorge Lopez-Vargas ◽  
Janneth Alexandra Chicaiza

Purpose – The aim of this paper is to present an initiative to apply the principles of Linked Data to enhance the search and discovery of OpenCourseWare (OCW) contents created and shared by the universities. Design/methodology/approach – This paper is a case study of how linked data technologies can be applied for the enhancement of open learning contents. Findings – Results presented under the umbrella of OCW-Universia consortium, as the integration and access to content from different repositories OCW and the development of a query method to access these data, reveal that linked data would offer a solution to filter and select semantically those open educational contents, and automatically are linked to the linked open data cloud. Originality/value – The new OCW-Universia integration with linked data adds new features to the initial framework including improved query mechanisms and interoperability.


Author(s):  
Olga A. Lavrenova ◽  
Andrey A. Vinberg

The goal of any library is to ensure high quality and general availability of information retrieval tools. The paper describes the project implemented by the Russian State Library (RSL) to present Library Bibliographic Classification as a Networked Knowledge Organization System. The project goal is to support content and provide tools for ensuring system’s interoperability with other resources of the same nature (i.e. with Linked Data Vocabularies) in the global network environment. The project was partially supported by the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (RFBR).The RSL General Classified Catalogue (GCC) was selected as the main data source for the Classification system of knowledge organization. The meaning of each classification number is expressed by complete string of wordings (captions), rather than the last level caption alone. Data converted to the Resource Description Framework (RDF) files based on the standard set of properties defined in the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) model was loaded into the semantic storage for subsequent data processing using the SPARQL query language. In order to enrich user queries for search of resources, the RSL has published its Classification System in the form of Linked Open Data (https://lod.rsl.ru) for searching in the RSL electronic catalogue. Currently, the work is underway to enable its smooth integration with other LOD vocabularies. The SKOS mapping tags are used to differentiate the types of connections between SKOS elements (concepts) existing in different concept schemes, for example, UDC, MeSH, authority data.The conceptual schemes of the leading classifications are fundamentally different from each other. Establishing correspondence between concepts is possible only on the basis of lexical and structural analysis to compute the concept similarity as a combination of attributes.The authors are looking forward to working with libraries in Russia and other countries to create a common space of Linked Open Data vocabularies.


Author(s):  
Lynne C. Howarth

With the proliferation of digitized resources accessible via Internet and Intranet knowledge bases, and a pressing need to develop more sophisticated tools for the identification and retrieval of electronic resources, both general purpose and domain-specific metadata schemes have assumed a particular prominence. While recent work emanating from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has focused on the Resource Description Framework (RDF), and metadata maps or Acrosswalks” have been created to support the interoperability of metadata standards -- thus converting metatags from diverse domains from simply “machine-readable” to “machine-understandable”-- the next iteration, to “human-understandable,” remains a challenge. This apparent gap provides a framework for three-phase research (Howarth, 2000, 1999) to develop a tool which will provide a “human-understandable” front-end search assist to any XML-compliant metadata scheme. Findings from phase one, the analyses and mapping of seven metadata schemes, identify the particular challenges of designing a common “namespace”, populated with element tags which are appropriately descriptive, yet readily understood by a lay searcher, when there is little congruence within, and a high degree of variability across, the metadata schemes under study. Implications for the subsequent design and testing of both the proposed “metalevel ontology” (phase two), and the prototype search assist tool (phase three) are examined.


2020 ◽  
pp. 016555152093095
Author(s):  
Gustavo Candela ◽  
Pilar Escobar ◽  
Rafael C Carrasco ◽  
Manuel Marco-Such

Cultural heritage institutions have recently started to share their metadata as Linked Open Data (LOD) in order to disseminate and enrich them. The publication of large bibliographic data sets as LOD is a challenge that requires the design and implementation of custom methods for the transformation, management, querying and enrichment of the data. In this report, the methodology defined by previous research for the evaluation of the quality of LOD is analysed and adapted to the specific case of Resource Description Framework (RDF) triples containing standard bibliographic information. The specified quality measures are reported in the case of four highly relevant libraries.


Author(s):  
Mariana Baptista Brandt ◽  
Silvana Aparecida Borsetti Gregorio Vidotti ◽  
José Eduardo Santarem Segundo

A presente pesquisa objetiva propor um modelo de dados abertos conectados (linked open data - LOD), para um conjunto de dados abertos legislativos da Câmara dos Deputados. Para tanto, procede-se à revisão de literatura sobre os conceitos de dados abertos, dados abertos governamentais, dados conectados (linked data), e dados abertos conectados (linked open data), seguido de pesquisa aplicada, com a modelagem de dados legislativos no modelo LOD. Para esta pesquisa foi selecionado o conjunto de dados "Deputados", que contém informações como partido político, unidade federativa, e-mail, legislatura, entre outras, sobre os parlamentares. Desse modo, observa-se que a estruturação do conjunto de dados em RDF (Resource Description Framework) é possível com reuso de vocabulários e padrões já estabelecidos na Web Semântica como Dublin Core, Friend of a Friend (FOAF), RDF e RDF Schema, além de vocabulários de áreas correlatas, como a Ontologia da Câmara dos Deputados italiana e a da Assembleia Nacional Francesa. Conforme recomendação do padrão Linked Data, os recursos foram relacionados também a outros conjuntos de LOD para enriquecimento semântico, como as bases Geonames e DBpedia. O estudo que permite concluir que a disponibilização dos dados governamentais, em especial, dados legislativos, pode ser feita seguindo as recomendações da W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) e, assim, integrar os dados legislativos à Web de Dados e ampliar as possibilidades de reuso e aplicações dos dados em ações de transparência e fiscalização, aproximando os cidadãos do Congresso e de seus representantes.


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yu-Jung Cheng ◽  
Shu-Lai Chou

Purpose This study applies digital humanity tools (Gephi and Protégé) for establishing and visualizing ontologies in the cultural heritage domain. According to that, this study aims to develop a novel evaluation approach using five ontology indicators (data overview, visual presentation, highlight links, scalability and querying) to evaluate the knowledge structure presentation of cultural heritage ontology. Design/methodology/approach The researchers collected and organized 824 pieces of government’s open data (GOD), converted GOD into the resource description framework format, applied Protégé and Gephi to establish and visualize cultural heritage ontology. After ontology is built, this study recruited 60 ontology participants (30 from information and communications technology background; 30 from cultural heritage background) to operate this ontology and gather their different perspectives of visual ontology. Findings Based on the ontology participant’s feedback, this study discovered that Gephi is more supporting than Protégé when visualizing ontology. Especially in data overview, visual presentation and highlight links dimensions, which is supported visualization and demonstrated ontology class hierarchy and property relation, facilitated the wider application of ontology. Originality/value This study offers two contributions. First, the researchers analyzed data on East Asian architecture with novel digital humanities tools to visualize ontology for cultural heritage. Second, the study collected participant’s feedback regarding the visualized ontology to enhance its design, which can serve as a reference for future ontological development.


Information ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 361 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raji Ghawi ◽  
Jürgen Pfeffer

Linked Open Data (LOD) refers to freely available data on the World Wide Web that are typically represented using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and standards built on it. LOD is an invaluable resource of information due to its richness and openness, which create new opportunities for many areas of application. In this paper, we address the exploitation of LOD by utilizing SPARQL queries in order to extract social networks among entities. This enables the application of de-facto techniques from Social Network Analysis (SNA) to study social relations and interactions among entities, providing deep insights into their latent social structure.


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