1.
IRL: Irish Record Linkage, 1864 - 1913
Crea;ng and Consuming Metadata from Transcribed
Historical Vital Records for Inges;on in a Long-term
Digital Preserva;on PlaIorm
Dolores Grant (a) Christophe Debruyne (b),
Rebecca Grant (a), and Sandra Collins (a)
(a) Digital Repository of Ireland, Royal Irish Academy, Dublin, Ireland
(b) ADAPT @ Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
October 27, 2015 @ META4eS

2.
IRL: Irish Record Linkage, 1864 - 1913
Developing a plaLorm applying
semanMc technologies to historical
birth, death and marriage cerMficates.
Answering quesMons such as: “How
accurate are historic maternal
mortality rates (MMR) and infant
mortality rates (IMR) for Dublin?”
Team consists of researchers
(historians), digital archivists, and
knowledge engineers.
Knowledge and
Linked Data
Engineers
Historians
Digital
Archivists

3.
IRL: Irish Record Linkage, 1864 - 1913
General Registers Office (GRO)
• Vital registration data: birth-
certificates, death-certificates
and marriage records.
• Digitised TIFF images of
hardcopy indexes and registers.
• 2 TB of data
• Database describing the
digitised records allowing
searches on some fields.
©General Records Office of Ireland 2014

4.
IRL: Irish Record Linkage, 1864 - 1913
In prior work (see [1]), we created a Linked Data plaLorm that allowed Digital
Archivists to transcribe register pages, which were then transformed into RDF. That
RDF was then used to populate other triplestores to analyze that data.
Part of the project, however, was also to inves;gate the digital long-term
preserva;on of the digi;zed register pages, and the corresponding RDF.
CreaMon of IRL
Knowledge Base
RelaMonal
Database
GRO
Triplestore
TransformaMon
Vital Records
Ontology
SeparaMon of Concerns
Historical Events
Ontology
IRL
Triplestore
Data AnalyMcs
Digital Archivist Historian
LOD
Cloud

5.
IRL: Irish Record Linkage, 1864 - 1913
Related work
• Related work on the preservaMon of harvested metadata exist,
e.g., in the context of GLAMS.
• Liale work was to be found in the context of historical (vital)
records. It was limited to integraMon problems and addressing
the problem record linking in databases.
• We also wanted to focus on research project agnosMc
transcripMon of historical vital records (separaMon of concerns)

6.
IRL: Irish Record Linkage, 1864 - 1913
Method: Crea;ng RDF Documents
• Register pages are idenMfied by a stamp number (e.g.
“4646439”). We collect the triples around a page and related
records with the following query to create an RDF document.
• PREFIX rec: <hap://purl.org/net/irish-record-linkage/records#>
DESCRIBE * { ?page rec:stampNumber "4646439";
rec:withRecord ?record. }
• We also add a foaf:primaryTopic statement to the document.

7.
IRL: Irish Record Linkage, 1864 - 1913
Method: Crea;ng Qualified Dublin Core Metadata
• AdopMng the guidelines formulated in [2], we adopted XSPARQL
[3] to transform RDF documents in Qualified Dublin Core
Metadata Documents. We thus have an RDF file and a QDC file
for each register page.

8.
IRL: Irish Record Linkage, 1864 - 1913
Register Page
District/Union/County [SPATIAL COVERAGE]
Superintendent registrar's district
Date cerMfied as true copy by superintendent registrar [ISSUED]
Date cerMfied by registrar [CREATED]
Forename/surname registrar on page
Forename/surname superintendent registrar [CREATOR]
Page number/Volume/Quarter
Stamp number [IDENTIFIER / used in TITLE]
Year registered [TEMPORAL COVERAGE]
Record
Date of registraMon
Title/forename/surname
registrar
Amendments
Number in register
CerMficate
Forename/surname (of subject) [PART OF
DESCRIPTION]
Address (of subject)
Sex (of subject) [PART OF DESCRIPTION]
Forename/surname informant
QualificaMon of informant
RelaMonship of informant
Residence of informant
Death Record
Forename/surname of registrar
Date of death [PART OF DESCRIPTION]
Cause of death and duraMon of illness
CondiMon
Age last birthday
Place of residence
Rank, profession or occupaMon
1
0..10

9.
IRL: Irish Record Linkage, 1864 - 1913

10.
IRL: Irish Record Linkage, 1864 - 1913
RelaMonal
Database
GRO
Triplestore
TransformaMon
Vital Records
Ontology
Digital Archivist
RDF File 1
RDF File 2
RDF File n
Qualified
Dublin Core
XML 1
Qualified
Dublin Core
XML 2
Qualified
Dublin Core
XML n
Regiser
Page 1
Regiser
Page 2
Regiser
Page n
transform
…
…
…
Digital long-term preservaMon plaLorm
ingesMon
Part of the IRL PlaLorm

11.
IRL: Irish Record Linkage, 1864 - 1913
Method: Bulk Inges;on into a Digital Long Term Repository
• We adopted the Digital Repository of Ireland
hap://repository.dri.ie/
• Provides item by item ingesMon, or bulk inges;on via a
command line tools.
• Files (digiMzed register pages, RDF and QDC) are named in a
certain way to related QDC with the digiMzed asset and RDF
transcripMon.

12.
IRL: Irish Record Linkage, 1864 - 1913

13.
IRL: Irish Record Linkage, 1864 - 1913
Conclusions and Future Work
• We created an automated process for creaMng and uploading
assets, RDF transcripMons and associated metadata in a long
term preservaMon plaLorm.
• EvaluaMon is limited due to the data sharing agreements; in
terms of discoverability on the repository via faceted search and
in terms of suitability of the metadata via expert feedback.
• Comparison of Qualified Dublin Core with Encoded Archival
DescripMon (EAD) is to be conducted as well.

14.
IRL: Irish Record Linkage, 1864 - 1913
References
1. Christophe Debruyne, Oya Deniz Beyan, Rebecca Grant, Sandra Collins, Stefan Decker: On
a Linked Data PlaLorm for Irish Historical Vital Records. TPDL 2015: 99-110
2. BusMllo, M., Collins, S., Gallagher, D., Grant, R., Harrower, N., Kenny, S., Ní Cholla, R.,
O’Carroll, A., Redmond, S., Webb, S.: Qualified Dublin Core and the Digital Repository of
Ireland (Grant, R. ed.). Tech. rep., Maynooth: Maynooth University; Dublin: Trinity
College Dublin; Dublin: Royal Irish Academy; Galway: NaMonal University of Ireland,
Galway (2015)
3. Dell’Aglio, D., Polleres, A., Lopes, N., Bischof, S.: Querying the Web of Data with XSPARQL
1.1. In: Verborgh, R., Mannens, E. (eds.) Proceedings of the ISWC Developers Workshop
2014, co-located with the 13th InternaMonal SemanMc Web Conference (ISWC 2014),
Riva del Garda, Italy, October 19, 2014. CEUR Work- shop Proceedings, vol. 1268, pp.
113–118. CEUR-WS.org (2014)

15.
IRL: Irish Record Linkage, 1864 - 1913
QuesMons?
More informaMon
• Twiaer: @IRL_Project
• Project website hap://irishrecordlinkage.wordpress.com/