LINKED DATA What is it?

Meaningful Markup: the semantic web isn't just about putting data on t h e w e b . I t i s a b o u t m a k i n g connections, so that a person, or a machine, can explore the web of data.

LINKED DATA What are the possibilities?

Meaningful Markup: the semantic web isn't just about putting data on the web. Currently, Web content is formatted for human readers rather than programs. HTML i s the predominant language in which Web pages are written (directly or using tools)

When we talk about semantic markup, we talk about markup that has meaning rather than markup defining the presentation or the look of the website.

LINKED DATA versus hyperlinks?

LINKED DATA What do you mean?

But could the content on the page be more semantic? Could we make it more meaningful to things like search engines and other automated devices that might be “looking” at the page and “reading” the information? And what would be the benefit of doing this? And how do we standardize that markup for places, people, events and more?

Enter URIs (Unique Resource Identifiers) and RDF (Resource Description Framework) These are W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) specification that's designed to explain relationships. RDF does some conceptual heavy lifting. It's frequently written in XML, and it's often used for back end work in websites.

LINKED DATA More, please.

LINKED DATA The delicious details

Linked data assigns unique identifiers (URIs) to concepts and things. It creates a “triple”, that is it connects the identifiers with labelled directed edges, shifting the data integration load on to the provider side. The labels used for the edges are published by an external authority (W3C, Dublin Core, schema.org)

LINKED DATA Why does it matter for DH?

The digital humanities use a lot of data to study the relations between things.

Data acquisition and curation represents a lot of effort for data consumers.

Linked Open Data is a good way to facilitate your own work (as a data consumer) and to facilitate other’s work (as a data publisher).

🐶Available on the web, but with an open license.

🐶🐶Available as machine-readable structured data (e.g. excel instead of image scan of a table)

🐶🐶🐶as (2) plus non-proprietary format (e.g. CSV instead of excel)

🐶🐶🐶🐶

All the above plus, use open standards from W3C (RDF and SPARQL) to identify things, so that people can point at your stuff

🐶🐶🐶🐶🐶All the above, plus: link your data to other people’s data to provide context

LINKED DATA How friendly is your data?

LINKED DATA Dive in!

Interested in . . . - Exploring research projects applying LOD

technologies to digital cultural heritage materials? - Linked Jazz at the NYPL or CLAROS at the OeRC - Seeing an example at Yale of LOD? - Yale Center for British Art (for the technical

details, see here) - Understanding authority control and why it

matters for research on the web? - Converting MARC records to RDF?

LINKED DATA Learn more

Antoniou, G. and van Harmelen, F. (2004). A Semantic Web Primer. MIT Press.

Huber, Jakob, Sztyler, T. , Noessner, J., Murdock, J., Allen, C. , Niepert, M. (2014). LODE: Linking Digital Humanities Content to the Web of Data. [Link] 

Pattuelli, M.C. (2012). Personal name vocabularies as Linked Open Data. A case study of jazz artist names. Journal of Information Science, 38(6), 558–565. [Preprint]

Pattuelli, M. C. and Rubinow, S. (2013). The knowledge organization of DBpedia: A case study. Journal of Documentation, (69)6. [PDF] [Link]

Pattuelli, M. C., Miller, M. and Hwang, K. (2015). Accidental discovery, intentional inquiry: Leveraging linked data to uncover the women of jazz. Digital Humanities 2015. 

Dog photos by Seth Castille

http://www.sethcasteel.com/#!/home