Linked Pasts initiative

Hi all,

Loïc Jeanson and I were present at the LinkedPasts IV Symposion in December in Mainz (and as far as I understood, Ben Brumfield could be a person via which Georg Vogeler is connected to that context as well: there was a poster on "Linked Open Data and Digital Edition of Historical Accounts" by the two of them presented by Ben). Maybe there are even more connections, but these are the ones I am aware of (besides Richard's post above).

I do think that there are clear parallels of ideas and common needs and I have suggested there that the LinkedPasts network should consider getting in touch with the DfH consortium and we will see what comes of it. (I have joined the LinkedPasts network only recently, so I cannot tell for sure, but it seems to me that it is in certain respects a somewhat loose network, which could mean that it's not so clear who of them should reach out to the DataForHistory group or when or how or in whose name etc.) Anyway, I assume getting a discussion going where people from the two contexts intermingle and discuss concrete issues and questions might even be preferable to "high-level negotiations".

In this vein: One of the discussion rounds was of particular interest and I would like to briefly report on that one. It was a breakout group dedicated to tools and pipelines (... for linking up historiographical datasets). Speaking about challenges that the participants encountered, there were two main subjects, ontology design/alignment on the one hand and toolchain construction on the other. Since there was a goal of reaching concrete results and commitments at the event, we decided to focus on the second topic and postpone discussion of the first one to another channel. (I have volunteered to take the ontology discussion to the ADHO LOD SIG and also to check if this Consortium could be a discussion partner. I will try to open a new thread in the forum for this in the next days.)

With regards to toolchains, it was more issues like content generation, transformation, interlinking and publishing that we were talking about and we agreed to set up a kind of tool matrix where linked data tools would be collected and documented according to criteria like these:

{
"name": "",
"links": [],
"dateOfEntry": "",
"entryLevel": "{beginner:yes/no}",
"consumesLOD": "true/false",
"producesLOD": "true/false",
"inputFormats": ["JPG", "TIFF", "PNG", "N3", "RDF/XML", "XML-TEI", "CSV", "JSON-LD", "GEOJSON", "IIIF-JSON", "PLAIN-TEXT", "HTML", "TTL", "SHP", "X3D", "any 3D format", "SQL", "SPARQL", "SHAQL", "CYPHER", "audio/video"],
"outputFormats": ["JPG", "TIFF", "PNG", "N3", "RDF/XML", "XML-TEI", "CSV", "JSON-LD", "GEOJSON", "IIIF-JSON", "PLAIN-TEXT", "HTML", "TTL", "SHP", "X3D", "any 3D format", "SQL", "SPARQL", "SHAQL", "CYPHER", "audio/video"]
}

A second part of the document will be dedicated to description of use cases in terms of concrete pipelines/toolchains/workflows, where projects have used a series of such tools in order to produce their Linked Data offer.

I guess when it's done (or has progressed somewhat) this could be of interest for the DfH members as well, and vice cersa, a tool like OntoME or a discussion platform for concrete questions around ontology design/alignment will certainly be of interest to many persons in the LinkedPasts network.

FWIW, the notes of the discussion round are (as of now still) online at HackMD, a summary of the "ontology cluster" of issues we identified is here.

If you have questions, I will be happy to elaborate. (And maybe Richard and Loïc will want to chime in as well.)

Cheers,

Andreas