1. DiJeSt.net
LOD4JS
Linked Open Data for
Jewish Studies
A DiJeSt Project
Yael Netzer,
Kepa Rodriguez,
Sinai Rusinek
The project DiJest was supported by Rothschild Foundation Hanadiv Europe slides: https://bit.ly/ajl2020

2. DiJeSt.net
DiJeSt.net
DiJeSt Data: - becoming more connected!

3. DiJeSt.net
Catalogues as data
Traditional objectives of catalogues and authority files (among others):
- search a book, discover a book
- search by author, place, subject
- indexing the inventory
Catalogues are bodies of knowledge that change in time
Our objective and methodology:
Transfer catalogues/authority files into tables
Understand content as a whole
Inspect variations and unify values such as dates and place names
View information in additional perspectives: “distant reading” Digital Humanities concept
Derive new representations (e.g., Linked Open Data, maps)

4. DiJeSt.net
Reading Authority Files - People
Starting point: Israeli National Library authority file heb100.xml
July 2018 (marc/xml file)
203,771 Entities

5. DiJeSt.net
Reading Catalogues:
Bibliography of the Hebrew Book
Small sized (107977 records), comprehensive, importance (authority)
But:
messy, not machine readable
(names, dates, places etc.)
No mapping to the authority files of NLI:
We did it using OpenRefine

6. DiJeSt.net
Reading Authority File: Places
Connect place names in catalogue to place authority files, following
previous work on Kima (by Sinai Rusinek)

7. DiJeSt.net
Process
1. Identify relevant fields, subfields, indicators in marc(xml,json)from NLI
2. Map into columns using python code
3. Inspect with OpenRefine
4. Back to 1 until satisfied with results

8. DiJeSt.net

9. DiJeSt.net
OpenRefine - A powerful tool
- Faceting and clustering
- Many knowledge representation formats
- Easy identification of errors and inconsistencies
- Built-in functions, possible usage of python (jython), closure
- Easy API calls, collect and add information
- Reconciliation with external, LOD resources
- Various exporting options, including generation of linked data (RDFs)
- Open source, resourceful community, FAIR principles
https://openrefine.org

10. DiJeSt.net
Collection as Data

11. DiJeSt.net
Data model: framework and ontologies (1)
When we designed our model, we decided:
● To make our data available for reuse: open data sharing policy.
● To make our data understandable for computers (machine-actionable).
● To make possible to navigate from our data to other resources.
● Expose our data as Linked Open Data (LOD).

12. DiJeSt.net
Data model: framework and ontologies (2)
LOD uses the Resource Description Framework (RDF) to describe the data as subject-predicate-object
triples.
● djr:book_152786 dcterms:creator djr:person_1403804
○ “The book with ID 152786 was created by the person with ID 1403804”
○ The author of “‫במלכודת‬ ‫”נערות‬ is Mordechai Narkis
We use standard ontologies to model our entity types.
That increases understandability for non-human agents.
● Authorities:
○ Person: skos, schema.org, dbpedia, rdaregistry, eac-cpf
○ Place: skos, schema.org, wgs84_pos
● Books:
○ Dublin core terms, fabio, GND, bibframe

13. DiJeSt.net
Data model: framework and ontologies (3)

14. DiJeSt.net

15. DiJeSt.net
What can be done with it? eLinda
● http://tdk-p6.cs.technion.ac.il:8083/
● With Oren Mishali, Technion Data & Knowledge Lab (TD&K)
●

16. DiJeSt.net

17. DiJeSt.net

18. DiJeSt.net

19. DiJeSt.net

20. DiJeSt.net

21. DiJeSt.net

22. DiJeSt.net
Vision
Connect with other LOD resources:
Jewish Book Shelf
Judaica link
Wikidata
Epidat
Future projects:
Expand the model to also represent:
● Book copies - library holdings
● Book copies can be owned and censored
by people (Footprints)
● Works: model Ben Yehuda Project
● Places: model KIMA
Include authorities for Publishers and Printers (NLI)

23. DiJeSt.net

24. DiJeSt.netUsing
Kima
http://data.geo-kima.org/
and CartoDB to create an
interactive map of BHB

25. DiJeSt.net
label: ‫!תודה‬
alternativeLabel: !‫תודה‬
alternativeLabel: thank you!
http://dijest.net/
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.