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Using Biographical Texts as Linked Data for Prosopographical Research and Applications

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Digital Heritage. Progress in Cultural Heritage: Documentation, Preservation, and Protection (EuroMed 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11196))

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Abstract

This paper argues that representing texts as semantic Linked Data provides a useful basis for analyzing their contents in Digital Humanities research and for Cultural Heritage application development. The idea is to transform Cultural Heritage texts into a knowledge graph and a Linked Data service that can be used flexibly in different applications via a SPARQL endpoint. The argument is discussed and evaluated in the context of biographical and prosopographical research and a case study where over 13 000 life stories form biographical collections of Biographical Centre of the Finnish Literature Society were transformed into RDF, enriched by data linking, and published in a SPARQL endpoint. Tools for biography and prosopography, data clustering, network analysis, and linguistic analysis were created with promising first results.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/ accessed: 13 August 2018.

  2. 2.

    In some use cases, e.g., in person registries [12], the whole registry entry may be written using this kind of semi-formal language.

  3. 3.

    http://cidoc-crm.org accessed: 13 August 2018.

  4. 4.

    http://persistence.uni-leipzig.org/nlp2rdf/specification/core.html accessed: 13 August 2018.

  5. 5.

    http://dublincore.org/documents/dcmi-terms/ accessed: 13 August 2018.

  6. 6.

    Denoted with prefix nbf in the RDF examples.

  7. 7.

    http://turkunlp.github.io/Finnish-dep-parser/ accessed: 13 August 2018.

  8. 8.

    http://universaldependencies.org/format.html accessed: 13 August 2018.

  9. 9.

    For example, the SeCo LAS [19] is a combination of several Finnish NLP tools.

  10. 10.

    The running time complexity O(mn), where n is the amount of files and m their size in bytes.

  11. 11.

    https://kansallisbiografia.fi/ accessed: 13 August 2018.

  12. 12.

    http://www.ldf.fi accessed: 13 August 2018.

  13. 13.

    http://seco.cs.aalto.fi/projects/dcert/ accessed: 13 August 2018.

  14. 14.

    http://developers.google.com/maps/ accessed: 13 August 2018.

  15. 15.

    http://www.tfidf.com/ accessed: 13 August 2018.

  16. 16.

    https://radimrehurek.com/gensim/ accessed: 13 August 2018.

  17. 17.

    https://gephi.org/ accessed: 13 August 2018.

  18. 18.

    http://www.oxforddnb.com/ accessed: 13 August 2018.

  19. 19.

    http://www.anb.org/ accessed: 13 August 2018.

  20. 20.

    http://www.ndb.badw-muenchen.de accessed: 13 August 2018.

  21. 21.

    https://sok.riksarkivet.se/Sbl/Start.aspx accessed: 13 August 2018.

  22. 22.

    http://www.biografischportaal.nl/en accessed: 13 August 2018.

  23. 23.

    http://www.biographynet.nl/ accessed: 13 August 2018.

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Acknowledgements

Our research is part of the Severi project (http://seco.cs.aalto.fi/projects/severi accessed: 13 August 2018), funded mainly by Business Finland.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Semantic Computing Research Group (SeCo), Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland

    Minna Tamper, Petri Leskinen, Kasper Apajalahti & Eero Hyvönen

  2. HELDIG – Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Eero Hyvönen

Authors
  1. Minna Tamper
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  2. Petri Leskinen
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  3. Kasper Apajalahti
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  4. Eero Hyvönen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Minna Tamper .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Cyprus University of Technology, Limassol, Cyprus

    Marinos Ioannides

  2. American Art Collaborative Linked Open Data Initiative, Arlington, VA, USA

    Eleanor Fink

  3. Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Raffaella Brumana

  4. The Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Petros Patias

  5. National Technical University of Athens, Athens, Greece

    Anastasios Doulamis

  6. CTS-UNINOVA, Caparica, Portugal

    João Martins

  7. University of the Peloponnese, Tripoli, Greece

    Manolis Wallace

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Tamper, M., Leskinen, P., Apajalahti, K., Hyvönen, E. (2018). Using Biographical Texts as Linked Data for Prosopographical Research and Applications. In: Ioannides, M., et al. Digital Heritage. Progress in Cultural Heritage: Documentation, Preservation, and Protection. EuroMed 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11196. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01762-0_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01762-0_11

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