Adventures in Linked Data: Building a
Connected Research Environment
Lisa Goddard, Memorial University Libraries
& INKE Research Group
Access 2012, Montreal QC
October 19th, 2012
Canadian Writing Research
Collaboratory (CWRC)
CFI funded initiative to
establish an online
infrastructure for
literary research in and
about Canada.
www.cwrc.ca
Canadian Writing Research
Collaboratory (CWRC)
“To enable unprecedented avenues for
studying the words that most move people
in and about Canada.”
Authoring
Dissemination
Discovery
Collaboration
“We need to stop talking around the issue of
the single-author monograph as the
benchmark for excellence.” (DH Manifesto,
2004)
Senior Scholars
Librarians
Programmers
Emergent
Scholars
Project
Managers
Why Linked Data for the Humanties?
Improved Search
Find all references to food
in Joyce’s Ulysses.
New Discovery Tools
Instead of looking for a needle in a
haystack, an effective text mining tool will
show you the shape of the haystack and
tell you what needles are there that you'd
want to stick in your foot. (Rockwell,
2011)
Interoperability
Disparate data sources and
incompatible data structures
are among the biggest
obstacles for 21st century
humanities researchers.
(RIN, 2011)
Collaboration
Linked data doesn’t just accommodate
collaboration, it enforces collaboration.
Big (Text) Data
Scale is a new horizon
of intellectual inquiry.
What kinds of
humanistic
phenomena appear
only at scale? (Liu,
2012)
Heterogeneity
Text data is messy.
Getting Started
Dev Platform
The Orlando Project
Identify Top Level Entities
http://domain.org/doc.html
Annotation
Mint URIs for Entities
http://this.ca/event
http://this.ca/place
http://this.ca/person
http://this.ca/doc
Annotation
http://this.ca/org
http://this.ca/annotation
http://this.ca/film
http://this.ca/book
Cool URIs Don’t Change
Do you really feel
that the old URIs
cannot be kept
running? If so, you
chose them very
badly.
- Sir Tim
Sir Tim Berners-Lee
is judging you.
Minting URIs
Abstract away from implementation details.
http://tiger.cwrc.ca/person.php?id=
virginia-woolf&format=rdf
http://cwrc.ca/person/virginia-woolf
Canonical URIs
http://dbpedia.org/resource/Virginia_woolf
(303 redirects and content negotiation)
http://dbpedia.org/page/
Virginia_Woolf
http://dbpedia.org/data/
Virginia_Woolf.rdf
URI Patterns
http://dbpedia.org/resource/Mary_Shelley
http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n85300519
http://viaf.org/viaf/95216565/
http://cwrc.ca/person/6qMXIR5UNQSiupA
Define Relationships
http://this.ca/event
http://this.ca/place
http://this.ca/person
employs
http://this.ca/doc
Annotation
http://this.ca/annotation
http://this.ca/org
adaptedFrom
http://this.ca/film
http://this.ca/book
RDF Statement
wrote
http://viaf.org/viaf/39385478/
http://dbpedia.org/resource/Mrs_Dalloway
http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/creator
subject
predicate
object
Machine Readable Definitions
http://this.ca/event
http://this.ca/place
?
http://this.ca/person
employs
http://this.ca/doc
Annotation
http://this.ca/annotation
http://this.ca/org
adaptedFrom
http://this.ca/film
http://this.ca/book
Ontologies
The semantic web is basically an
accessibility initiative for machines.
Role of Ontologies
•
•
•
•
Define entities (classes)
Define relationships (properties)
Impose rules to support machine reasoning.
Machine-readable (RDF)
Reuse or Build?
An ontology is for life.
Ontology Dowsing
foaf:Person (Class)
frbr:Work (Class)
Assigning Entities to Classes
cwrc:Woolf
rdf:type
http://cwrc.ca/person/456789
foaf:Person
http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/Person
http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#type
rdf:type
cwrc:
frbr:Work
MrsDalloway
http://cwrc.ca/person/456789
http://purl.org/vocab/frbr/core#Work
http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#type
Ontology: Predicates
Person to Person
e.g. Relationship Ontology (rel:EnemyOf)
Document to Document
e.g. Bibliographic Ontology (bibo:reviewOf)
Annotation to Document
e.g. Open Annotation Ontology (oa:hasTarget)
Ontology: Predicates
LifePartnerOf
Person
Person
Domain
Range
Classes and predicates work together
to support reasoning.
Woolf
Woolf
Woolf
creator
Mrs.
Dalloway
livedIn
Mrs.
Dalloway
lifePartnerOf
Mrs.
Dalloway
CWRC RDF Ontologies
Entity
Relevant Ontologies
Person
FOAF, MADS, EAC-CPF
Work
FRBR, MODS, DC
Place
WGS84 Geo Positioning, Geonames
Organization
FOAF, EAC-CPF
Event
OWL Time, Event
Annotation
Open Annotation, OAI-ORE
So Far
• defined our major entities and relationships
• minted URIs to represent those things within
the CWRC data store
• selected ontologies that will help computers
to reason about our entities and relationships
Data Model
Integrating the Data Model
Creates
CWRC-Writer Tagging Toolbar
Results from
Authority File.
API Lookup to
Web Services.
VIAF OpenSearch
http://viaf.org/viaf/search?query=local.names+all+%22mar
garet%20atwood%22+&maximumRecords=100&startRecor
d=1&sortKeys=holdingscount&httpAccept=application/rss
%2Bxml
DBPedia RESTful API
curl -H "Content-Type: text/xml" -d @post.xml
http://dbpedia.org/fct/service > result.xml
Mary Shelley
Add custom
identifier.
Entity in XML
person
Bertrand Russell
w:content>
Bertrand Russell, 1872-1970
w:term>
36924137
11923140
118604287
n79056054
definite
List of named
entities.
Add
Relationship.
Relations Tab
Relationship in RDF
Entity in RDF
ent_1798
117
16
true
person
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell, 1872-1970
36924137
11923140
118604287
n79056054
definite
oa:Annotation
http://cwrc.ca/annotation/12345
oa:hasSemanticTag
http://cwrc.ca/work/12345
http://cwrc.ca/person/12345
“Patricia Spence was
nanny to Russell’s
children before
becoming his third
wife.”
CWRC Entity Management System
Enables
Populates
Triple Store
Entity storage
Discovery Tools
Entity lookup
Entity Management
Interface
(add, edit, merge,
split entities)
CWRC Writer
(document
authoring interface)
Credits
CWRC
Susan Brown
Mariana Parades-Olea
Jeffery Antoniuk
Denilson Barbosa
Ruth Knetchel
Omar Rodriguez-Arenas
INKE
Ray Siemens
Stan Ruecker
Harvey Quamen
John Simpson
Jentery Sayers
Related Links
CWRC Writer Beta:
http://cwrctc.artsrn.ualberta.ca/
CWRC Writer Overview:
http://www.cwrc.ca/projects/infrastructureprojects/technical-projects/cwrc-writer/
About CWRC:
http://www.cwrc.ca/about/