1.
ELAG 2014 Workshop. Bath, UK. 11–12th June 2014
Adrian Stevenson and Jane Stevenson
Mimas, University of Manchester, UK
@adrianstevenson @janestevenson
Linking Data with sameAs:
Challenges and Solutions

2.
Linking Lives
• An interface to biographical data, using
– the Archives Hub
– VIAF
– DBPedia
– the British National Biography (BNB)
– Copac
• http://archiveshub.ac.uk/linkinglives/

3.
owl:sameAs
<Archives Hub Person> owl:sameAs <VIAF Person>
<http://data.archiveshub.ac.uk/id/person/nra/webbma
rthabeatrice1858-1943socialreformer>
owl:sameAs
<http://viaf.org/viaf/86607236> .
3

4.
http://data.archiveshub.ac.uk/id/person/nra/web
bmarthabeatrice1858-1943socialreformer
foaf:familyName + foaf:givenName + hub:dates
“Webb, Martha Beatrice, 1858-1943”
http://viaf.org/viaf/86607236/
foaf:name
“Webb, Martha Beatrice, 1858-1943”
4

5.
Matching
• LOD Refine
• http://code.zemanta.com/sparkica/download.html
• SILK Framework
• http://wifo5-03.informatik.uni-
mannheim.de/bizer/silk/#workbench
5

6.
LOD Refine
6

7.
SILK
7

8.
Comments on the workshop
• ‘great lead-through on LOD refine’
• LOD Refine and Silk seem to be workable tools
for creating sameAs triples that can help
matching
• ‘purpose and possibilities of Silk perhaps a
little rushed for me’
• ‘made me realize how disconnected my
concept of Silk restrictions and Sparql was.
This is now fixed. Ta!’

9.
Comments on Linking Lives
• ‘Great to see the British National Biography
(BNB) being used’
• Linking Lives project shows the need for more
open data!’
• ‘We need robust Sparql endpoints!’

10.
Comments…
• ‘Funny how hard it is to find useful stuff to link
to, and how the user is to make sense of it’.
• ‘I feel reconciled!’
• ‘Linking = hard work’

11.
Challenges
Identifying entities:
• One of the main problems we came up with in
our linked data pilot connecting library
catalogue data and theatre performance data
was the lack of identifiers for people and
works
• String matching on personal names and work
titles in legacy heterogenous systems is
extremely important

12.
Challenges
• Question is how to match work titles in
multiple languages.