1. 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.

2. 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 is the
predominant language in which Web pages
are written (directly or using tools)

3. 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?

4. 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?

5. 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.

6. 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)

7. 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).

8. 🐶
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?

9. 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?

10. 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