Record linking in the EHRI portal

Abstract

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.

The Holocaust Archival Material Knowledge Graph

“…In the current EHRI Portal, vocabularies, annotations, and links are the only parts of the data model derived from and partially aligned with RDF, namely the Simple Knowledge Organisation System (SKOS) [28] in the case of vocabularies, and the Web Annotation Data Model [33] framework for annotations and links. EHRI's use of the relevant standards for linking and indexing metadata records is discussed further in [3].…”

“…From the very beginning, the EHRI Portal has had, as one of its main goals, the recontextualisation of Holocaust sources. In the project's second phase a system was introduced allowing descriptions of copied material to link to the holder of the original sources and/or those sources directly [3]. Users can now have a clearer view, where these connections are made, of the different versions of original archival material that is available to them in various holding institutions.…”

“…The development of the EHRI Portal, its technologies and APIs, along with various initiatives aimed at increasing the interconnectedness of its metadata have been described elsewhere [3]. In this paper we focus on our efforts to expose the rich metadata contained in the EHRI Portal, derived from institutions around the world as well as EHRI's own archival specialists, in a manner compatible with the Semantic Web and capable of better integrating with the emerging network of Linked Open Data (LOD) sources.…”

“…In this paper we focus on our efforts to expose the rich metadata contained in the EHRI Portal, derived from institutions around the world as well as EHRI's own archival specialists, in a manner compatible with the Semantic Web and capable of better integrating with the emerging network of Linked Open Data (LOD) sources. 3 Semantic Web technologies offer a unique means by which entities can be identified unambiguously, linked across databases, and where new data can be automatically inferred [4], capabilities which have been demonstrated to effectively support Digital Humanities activities [27]. The Knowledge Graph (KG) of Holocaust-related descriptions presented below, based on the EHRI Portal data, serves as a first step to increasing the visibility of this kind of material and facilitate other LOD publishers to link to EHRI's entities.…”