A semantic architecture for preserving and interpreting the information contained in Irish historical vital records

Abstract

Irish Record Linkage 1864-1913 is a multi-disciplinary project that started in 2014 aiming to create a platform for analyzing events captured in historical birth, marriage, and death records by applying semantic technologies for annotating, storing, and inferring information from the data contained in those records. This enables researchers to, among other things, investigate to what extent maternal and infant mortality rates were underreported. We report on the semantic architecture, provide motivation for the adoption of RDF and Linked Data principles, and elaborate on the ontology construction process that was influenced by both the requirements of the digital archivists and historians. Concerns of digital archivists include the preservation of the archival record and following best practices in preservation, cataloguing, and data protection. The historians in this project wish to discover certain patterns in those vital records

Linked data initiatives in libraries and information centres: a systematic review

“…It is easy to convert existing data sets into LD (Deliot, 2014), though Cole et al (2013) said there are limitations while using machine readable cataloguing (MARC) in comparison. Ryan et al (2015) stated that the conversion of bibliographic data in LD enhances the searching and discovery capabilities; to make the existing authentic data sets accessible through LD technology (Deliot, 2014); to make metadata available on the Web for others via LD technology (Haslhofer and Isaac, 2011; Nagai et al , 2015); LD provides opportunity to access broader audiences (Deliot, 2014); LD has the ability to show the vocabularies in a hierarchical nature and to create relationships between entities (Ryan et al , 2015); linking data to other data sets provides additional context for the interpretation of data (Debruyne et al , 2016); LD projects provide facility to others to convert their metadata into LD (Haslhofer and Isaac, 2011); other libraries and organisations can use metadata from those of a specific library (Illien, 2012); beneficial for other library applications; resources can cross link with other library resources and organisations with the help of LD (Illien, 2012); LD is useful for the organisation of itself and its community by linking data to Dbpedia or the Getty union list (Szekely et al , 2013); linked open data (LOD) metadata is also helpful for private companies for creating new products on the basis of existing metadata (Illien, 2012); to make a new model from existing data sets (Haslhofer and Isaac, 2011); to devise a tool for mapping structured data into resource description framework (RDF) instead of mapping only specific data to LOD (Szekely et al , 2013); LD principles and RDF provide easy opportunity for data modelling (Debruyne et al , 2016); collaborative effort of digital archivist and computer engineers provide a platform for collaboration in the form of an LD project (Debruyne et al , 2016); proposed technology regarding LD can be used for other archives and digital libraries for migration purposes (Rademaker et al , 2015); less dependency on the IT team after completion of a LD project (Rademaker et al , 2015); successful completion of a project with a small staff and short time motivates for further initiatives in the future (Hanson, 2014); and a LD project provides many research opportunities for automatic analysis in the LD domain (Rademaker et al , 2015).…”

“…The staff has to perform RDF serialisation and possess knowledge about writing Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation, both of which are time- and energy-consuming (Illien, 2012). Creation of RDF triples is a challenging task (Debruyne et al , 2016), and there is a need of a carrier, metadata schema, such as schema org., for converting bibliographic data into RDF. Many early experiments show that they create their own namespaces for their library data.…”

Linked Data and Cultural Heritage

“…This motivational factor placed value on the preservation and care for collections over time. This factor was mentioned in Mi and Pollock [16], Debruyne et al [47], Coppens et al [35], and Hyvönen et al [32].…”

Design and implementation of a Web application for Cultural Heritage

“…Although WeME can be used by various stakeholders, a distinction should be done between librarians, archivists and scholars [14]. From the point of view of WeME, librarians and archivists can be grouped in the same category.…”

“…Anyway, it would be interesting to extend it to also provide this feature. WeME differs from the strategy adopted in Debruyne et al (2016) [14] study, where two different knowledge bases are built, one for archivists/librarians and the other for scholars. In WeME, instead, only one knowledge base is built to satisfy both needs.…”