Building Linked Open Date Entities for Historical Research

Abstract

Time is a focal point for historical research. Although existing Linked Open Data (LOD) resources hold time entities, they are often limited to modern period and year-month precision at most. Therefore, researchers are currently unable to execute co-reference resolution through entity linking to integrate different datasets which contain information on the day level or remote past. This paper aims to build an RDF model and lookup service for historical time at the lowest granularity level of a single day at a specific point in time, for the duration of 6000 years. The project, Linked Open Date Entities (LODE), generates stable URIs for over 2.2 million entities, which include essential information and links to other LOD resources. The value of date entities is discussed in a couple of use cases with existing datasets. LODE facilitates improved access and connectivity to unlock the potential for the data integration in interdisciplinary research.

Dura-Europos Stories: Developing interactive storytelling applications using knowledge graphs for cultural heritage exploration

“…Similar projects in the domain of digital humanities include the Biography Sampo project and the other Sampo applications from Finland [5,6]. Many researchers have explored the use of semantic technologies to support historical inquiry [9,15]. Other projects have also described the use of Wikidata to support research in the domain…”

“…The Stories Services team created a package for working with Wikidata data in a Django application. 15 The Django-wikidata-api library is designed loosely around the core Django object-relational mapping (ORM), modified…”

Instance level analysis on linked open data connectivity for cultural heritage entity linking and data integration

“…What is clear is that users have currently a very limited possibility to execute NEL for numeric dates. To fill this gap, we have recently started a project to create LOD for the numeric date entities [38].…”

“…1349 SKOS properties are used among which 10 skos:prefLabel, 18 skos:altLabel, and 1246 skos:narrower are present. Whereas 251 Dublin Core Metadata Terms (dct:) 38 and 202 Getty Ontology (gvp:) 39 are in use, 60 PROV (prov:) 40 and 56 SKOS-XL (skosxl:) 41 are also found. Although not all properties use rdf:resource, the figures provide us a clue about the relation between linking and property usage.…”

“…See also http:// www.jenitennison.com/2009/07/25/opaque-uris-unreadable-uris.html, last accessed 2021-01-26. 38 38.4% use rdfs:seeAlso, schema:sameAs and skos:exactMatch are in the minority. As GeoNames provides the link to DBpedia with rdfs:seeAlso, the equivalent identity cannot be inferred.…”