Improving Access to the Dutch Historical Censuses with Linked Open Data

Abstract

The Dutch Historical Censuses (1795–1971) contain statistics that describe almost two centuries of History in the Netherlands. These censuses were conducted once every 10 years (with some exceptions) from 1795 to 1971. Researchers have used its wealth of demographic, occupational, and housing information to answer fundamental questions in social economic history. However, accessing these data has traditionally been a time consuming and knowledge intensive task. In this paper, we describe the outcomes of the cedar project, which make access to the digitized assets of the Dutch Historical Censuses easier, faster, and more reliable. This is achieved by using the data publishing paradigm of Linked Data from the Semantic Web. We use a digitized sample of 2,288 census tables to produce a linked dataset of more than 6.8 million statistical observations. The dataset is modeled using the rdf Data Cube, Open Annotation, and prov vocabularies. The contributions of representing this dataset as Linked Data are: (1) a uniform database interface for efficient querying of census data; (2) a standardized and reproducible data harmonization workflow; and (3) an augmentation of the dataset through richer connections to related resources on the Web.