This presentation accompanies the paper that I gave at the Digital Arts and Humanities PhD Institute, which was held in University College Cork on 3-4 Sep 2014. It introduces the topic of Linked Open Data mainly from the perspective of the archaeology scholar wishing to use it as a research asset.

1. Navigating Archaeology’s
Big Data Reality
Digital Arts and Humanities Institute
Cork 2014
Frank Lynam
Trinity College Dublin

2. 1

3. 1990s web chic
Amazon on their 1994 launch (retronaut.com)
David Hasselhoff online (www.subzerostudio.com/)
National Audobon Society (blog.crazyegg.com)
2

4. My type of digital archaeology
3D visualisation (arcseer.com)
Augmented Reality cultural heritage apps (kindareal.com) 3D artefact capture 3

5. The PhD early days
4

6. The carrot of Open Data and the
Semantic Web
5

7. 6

8. Mistake 1 - building everything from scratch
7

9. My next mistake - focussing entirely on
the data provider
8

10. 9

11. Linked Open Data by example
Asking a question of the British Museum’s
10
Linked Open Data interface

12. The RDF triple
subject
(uri)
object
(uri, literal)
predicate
(uri)
object
(uri, literal)
predicate
(uri)
11

13. An RDF triple example
‘…the man is from England…’
subject
predicate
object
12

14. One person’s subject is another’s object
‘…England is a country…’
subject
predicate
object
13

15. 14

16. An introduction to SPARQL
SELECT * {
?s ?p "Rembrandt"
} LIMIT 100
15

17. The British Museum’s response
16

18. The first record
17

19. Christ Healing the Sick, etching
(britishmuseum.org)
A reclining lion, ink drawing on paper
Garden vase and pedestal, ink sketch (britishmuseum.org)
(britishmuseum.org) 18

20. More complex SPARQL
SELECT ?s {
?s bmo:PX_object_type ?objecttype.
?objecttype skos:prefLabel "sarcophagus".
?s ecrm:P45_consists_of ?material.
?material skos:prefLabel "granodiorite"
} LIMIT 100
1
2
3
4
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21. The query’s graph
ecrm:P45_consists_of bmo:PX_object_type
?material ?s ?objecttype
skos:prefLabel skos:prefLabel
‘granodiorite’ ‘sarcophagus’
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22. lack of awareness
21

23. data SILOS
22

24. reliability
23

25. data POLICY
institutional
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26. 25
Parting questions
1. What does it mean to be a researcher in the new Big Data
archaeological research environment?
2. What tools are we now to use and are these radically
different to those used by our forebears?
3. Are the types of questions that we are now asking in some
way different?
4. How much creative and/or intellectual authority will we
cede to the control of machines out of necessity or
choice?
5. All of these questions combine to ultimately ask whether
we need to be talking in terms of new epistemological
environments when considering Big Data research or not?

27. Acknowledgements
Dep. of Classics, Trinity College Dublin
Dr Christine Morris
Digital Arts and Humanities PhD programme
PRTLI funded
The Priniatikos Pyrgos Project
Dr Barry Molloy and Dr Jo Day
Web: www.franklynam.com
www.linkedarc.net
Twitter: @flynam
Email: flynam@tcd.ie
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