A presentation from the EarlySaints Research Group 3rd Annual Meeting, February 3, 2016, Brigham Young University

1. Linked Data for
Early Mormonism
Tod Robbins, Dictionary of Mormon Biography

2. A bit about me
• BA in History from Utah Valley University (2010)
• MLIS from University of Washington’s iSchool (2012)
• Founded Dictionary of Mormon Biography (DMB) in 2012
• Independent researcher/developer

3. Case Study:
Dictionary of Mormon Biography
• Built with MediaWiki, the same software that runs Wikipedia
and a host of other wikis
• Original goal: Unique URLs for every documentable member of
the Latter Day Saint movement
• Currently: Many pages hyperlinked to authority files (VIAF,
LCCN, Wikidata, FamilySearch, MPOT, etc.)
• Next phase: created/expose linked data from every DMB URL
for discovery by other platforms

7. What is Linked Data?
• It is about making links, so that a person or
machine can explore the web of data.
• Browsable graphs of relationships between entities
• Resource Description Framework (RDF) Triples

8. What is Linked Data?
Brigham Young 1 June 1801
has birth date
Subject Object
Predicate
https://www.wikidata.org/
wiki/Q203559
1801-06-01
https://schema.org/birthDate

9. What is Linked Data?
• The four rules:
1. Use URLs as names for things
2. Use HTTP(S) URLs so that people can look up those names
3. When someone looks up a URL, provide useful information,
using the standards (RDF*, SPARQL, JSON-LD)
4. Include links to other URLs so that they can discover more
things

10. What is Linked Data?

11. Mormon Linked Data
1801-06-01
schema:birthDate
https://earlysaints.org/
eleazerMiller1795
earlysaints:baptizedBy
https://earlysaints.org/
brighamYoung1801
1836-03-30
earlysaints:dateOrdainedElder

12. Mormon Linked Data
https://earlysaints.org/
eleazerMiller1795
earlysaints:baptizedBy
https://earlysaints.org/
brighamYoung1801
https://history.lds.org/
overlandtravels/pioneers/
2317/eleazer-miller
skos:sameAs