As readers of this blog will know, the About Roman Emperors dataset is built upon the backbone of Wikipedia. More specifically, HTTP URIs like http://dbpedia.org/resource/Nero are programmatically created by the dbpedia project on the basis of Wikipedia content, and I used them to identify uniquely each emperor. Web pages and other resources about those emperors are then linked -- using FOAF and other vocabularies -- with those identifiers. These little packages of data about the emperors and their web pages are serialized in both HTML and RDF form on my website.
Today I've added some JavaScript to the HTML views of each emperor's page (e.g., "About the Roman Emperor Hadrian"). When the page loads, the JavaScript fires off a query at the dbpedia SPARQL endpoint, asking for title, abstract, image, and label information associated with the corresponding emperor's URI. Whatever it gets back is presented in the gray-backgrounded column to the right.
See what you think.
Showing posts with label rdf. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rdf. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Friday, June 7, 2013
Thursday, April 18, 2013
Citing Sources in Digital Annotations
I'm collaborating with other folks both in and outside ISAW on a variety of digital scholarly projects in which Linked Open Data is playing a big role. We're using the Resource Description Framework (RDF) to provide descriptive information for, and make cross-project assertions about, a variety of entities of interest and the data associated with them (places, people, themes/subjects, creative works, bibliographic items, and manuscripts and other text-bearing objects). So, for example, I can produce the following assertions in RDF (using the Terse RDF Triple Language, or TuRTLe):
This means: 'There's a resource identified with the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) "http://syriaca.org/place/45" about which the following is asserted:
(Folks familiar with what Sean Gillies has done for the Pleiades RDF will recognize my debt to him in the what proceeds.)
But there are plenty of cases in which just issuing a couple of triples to encode an assertion about something isn't sufficient; we need to be able to assign responsibility/origin for those assertions and to link them to supporting argument and evidence (i.e., standard scholarly citation practice). For this purpose, we're very pleased by the Open Annotation Collaboration, whose Open Annotation Data Model was recently updated and expanded in the form of a W3C Community Draft (8 February 2013) (the participants in Pelagios use basic OAC annotations to assert geographic relationships between their data and Pleiades places).
A basic OADM annotation uses a series of RDF triples to link together a "target" (the thing you want to make an assertion about) and a "body" (the content of your assertion). You can think of them as footnotes. The "target" is the range of text after which you put your footnote number (only in OADM you can add a footnote to any real, conceptual, or digital thing you can identify) and the "body" is the content of the footnote itself. The OADM draft formally explains this structure in section 2.1. This lets me add an annotation to the resource from our example above (the ancient city of Serugh) by using the URI "http://syriaca.org/place/45" as the target of an annotation) thus:
I hope you'll forgive me for not spelling that all out in plain text, as all the syntax and terms are explained in the OADM. What I'm concerned about in this blog post is really what the OADM doesn't explicitly tell me how to do, namely: show that the annotation body is actually a quotation from a published book. The verb oa:annotatedBy lets me indicate that the annotation itself was made (i.e., the footnote was written) by a resource identified by the URI "http://syriaca.org/editors.xml#tcarlson". If I'd given you a few more triples, you could have figured out that that resource is a real person named Thomas Carlson, who is one of the editors working on the Syriac Reference Portal project. But how do I indicate (as he very much wants to do because he's a responsible scholar and has no interest in plagiarizing anyone) that he's deliberately quoting a book called The Scattered Pearls: A History of Syriac Literature and Sciences? Here's what I came up with (using terms from Citation Typing Ontology and the DCMI Metadata Terms):
The addition of the triple containing cito:citesAsSourceDocument lets me make a machine-actionable link to the additional structured bibliographic data about the book that's available at Worldcat (but it doesn't say anything about page numbers!). The addition of the triple containing dcterms:bibliographicCitation lets me provide a human-readable citation.
I'd love to have feedback on this approach from folks in the OAC, CITO, DCTERMS, and general linked data communities. Could I do better? Should I do something differently?
The SRP team is currently evaluating a sample batch of such annotations, which you're also welcome to view. The RDF can be found here. These files are generated from the TEI XML here using the XSLT here.
<http://syriaca.org/place/45> a <http://geovocab.org/spatial#Feature> ;
rdfs:label "Serugh" ;
rdfs:comment "An ancient city where Jacob of Serugh was bishop."@en ;
foaf:primaryTopicOf <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suruç> ;
owl:sameAs <http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/658405#this> .
This means: 'There's a resource identified with the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) "http://syriaca.org/place/45" about which the following is asserted:
- it is a "Feature" as defined in the NeoGeo Spatial Ontology;
- the human-readable version of its name is "Serugh";
- a human-readable description (in the English language) of it is "An ancient city where Jacob of Serugh was bishop.";
- it is the primary topic of a document that is identified by the URI "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suruç"; and
- it is the same resource as that identified by another URI: "http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/658405#this".'
(Folks familiar with what Sean Gillies has done for the Pleiades RDF will recognize my debt to him in the what proceeds.)
But there are plenty of cases in which just issuing a couple of triples to encode an assertion about something isn't sufficient; we need to be able to assign responsibility/origin for those assertions and to link them to supporting argument and evidence (i.e., standard scholarly citation practice). For this purpose, we're very pleased by the Open Annotation Collaboration, whose Open Annotation Data Model was recently updated and expanded in the form of a W3C Community Draft (8 February 2013) (the participants in Pelagios use basic OAC annotations to assert geographic relationships between their data and Pleiades places).
A basic OADM annotation uses a series of RDF triples to link together a "target" (the thing you want to make an assertion about) and a "body" (the content of your assertion). You can think of them as footnotes. The "target" is the range of text after which you put your footnote number (only in OADM you can add a footnote to any real, conceptual, or digital thing you can identify) and the "body" is the content of the footnote itself. The OADM draft formally explains this structure in section 2.1. This lets me add an annotation to the resource from our example above (the ancient city of Serugh) by using the URI "http://syriaca.org/place/45" as the target of an annotation) thus:
<http://syriaca.org/place/45/anno/desc6> a oa:Annotation ;
oa:hasBody <http://syriaca.org/place/45/anno/desc6/body> ;
oa:hasTarget <http://syriaca.org/place/45> ;
oa:motivatedBy oa:describing ;
oa:annotatedBy <http://syriaca.org/editors.xml#tcarlson> ;
oa:annotatedAt "2013-04-03T00:00:01Z" ;
oa:serializedBy <https://github.com/paregorios/srpdemo1/blob/master/xsl/place2ttl.xsl> ;
oa:serializedAt "2013-04-17T13:35:05.771-05:00" .
<http://syriaca.org/place/45/anno/desc6/body> a cnt:ContentAsText, dctypes:Text ;
cnt:chars "an ancient town, formerly located near Sarug."@en ;
dc:format "text/plain" ;
I hope you'll forgive me for not spelling that all out in plain text, as all the syntax and terms are explained in the OADM. What I'm concerned about in this blog post is really what the OADM doesn't explicitly tell me how to do, namely: show that the annotation body is actually a quotation from a published book. The verb oa:annotatedBy lets me indicate that the annotation itself was made (i.e., the footnote was written) by a resource identified by the URI "http://syriaca.org/editors.xml#tcarlson". If I'd given you a few more triples, you could have figured out that that resource is a real person named Thomas Carlson, who is one of the editors working on the Syriac Reference Portal project. But how do I indicate (as he very much wants to do because he's a responsible scholar and has no interest in plagiarizing anyone) that he's deliberately quoting a book called The Scattered Pearls: A History of Syriac Literature and Sciences? Here's what I came up with (using terms from Citation Typing Ontology and the DCMI Metadata Terms):
<http://syriaca.org/place/45/anno/desc7/body> a cnt:ContentAsText, dctypes:Text ;
cnt:chars "a small town in the Mudar territory, between Ḥarran and Jarabulus. [Modern name, Suruç (tr.)]"@en ;
dc:format "text/plain" ;
cito:citesAsSourceDocument <http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/255043315> ;
dcterms:biblographicCitation "The Scattered Pearls: A History of Syriac Literature and Sciences, p. 558"@en .
The addition of the triple containing cito:citesAsSourceDocument lets me make a machine-actionable link to the additional structured bibliographic data about the book that's available at Worldcat (but it doesn't say anything about page numbers!). The addition of the triple containing dcterms:bibliographicCitation lets me provide a human-readable citation.
I'd love to have feedback on this approach from folks in the OAC, CITO, DCTERMS, and general linked data communities. Could I do better? Should I do something differently?
The SRP team is currently evaluating a sample batch of such annotations, which you're also welcome to view. The RDF can be found here. These files are generated from the TEI XML here using the XSLT here.
Monday, February 6, 2012
Playing with PELAGIOS: The GAWD is Live
The is the lastest in an on-going series chronicling my dalliances with data published by the PELAGIOS project partners.
I think it's safe to say that, thanks to the PELAGIOS partner institutions, that we do have a Graph of Ancient World Data (GAWD) on the web. It's still in early stages, and one has to do some downloading, unzipping, and so forth to engage with it at the moment, but indeed the long-awaited day has dawned.
Here's the perspective, as of last Friday, from the vantage point of Pleiades. I've used SPARQL to query the GAWD for all information resources that the partners claim (via their RDF data dumps) are related to Pleiades information resources. I.e., I'm pulling out a list of information resources about texts, pictures, objects, grouped by their relationships to what Pleiades knows about ancient places (findspot, original location, etc.). I've sorted that view of the graph by the titles Pleiades gives to its place-related information resources and generated an HTML view of the result. It's here for your browsing pleasure.
Next Steps and Desiderata
For various technical reasons, I'm not yet touching the data of a couple of PELAGIOS partners (CLAROS and SPQR), but the will hopefully be resolved soon. I still need to dig into figuring out what Open Context is doing on this front. Other key resources -- especially those emanating from ISAW -- are not yet ready to produce RDF (but we're working on it).
There are a few things I'd like the PELAGIOS partners to consider/discuss adding to their data:
I think it's safe to say that, thanks to the PELAGIOS partner institutions, that we do have a Graph of Ancient World Data (GAWD) on the web. It's still in early stages, and one has to do some downloading, unzipping, and so forth to engage with it at the moment, but indeed the long-awaited day has dawned.
Here's the perspective, as of last Friday, from the vantage point of Pleiades. I've used SPARQL to query the GAWD for all information resources that the partners claim (via their RDF data dumps) are related to Pleiades information resources. I.e., I'm pulling out a list of information resources about texts, pictures, objects, grouped by their relationships to what Pleiades knows about ancient places (findspot, original location, etc.). I've sorted that view of the graph by the titles Pleiades gives to its place-related information resources and generated an HTML view of the result. It's here for your browsing pleasure.
Next Steps and Desiderata
For various technical reasons, I'm not yet touching the data of a couple of PELAGIOS partners (CLAROS and SPQR), but the will hopefully be resolved soon. I still need to dig into figuring out what Open Context is doing on this front. Other key resources -- especially those emanating from ISAW -- are not yet ready to produce RDF (but we're working on it).
There are a few things I'd like the PELAGIOS partners to consider/discuss adding to their data:
- Titles/labels for the information resources (using rdfs:label?). This would make it possible for me to produce more intuitive/helpful labels for users of my HTML index. Descriptions would be cool too. As would some indication of the type of thing(s) a given resource addresses (e.g., place, statue, inscription, text)
- Categorization of the relationships between their information resources and Pleaides information resources. Perhaps some variation of the terms originally explored by Concordia (whence the GAWD moniker), as someone on the PELAGIOS list has already suggested.
What would you like to see added to the GAWD? What would you do with it?
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Playing with PELAGIOS: Arachne was easy after nomisma
Querying Pleiades annotations out of Arachne RDF was as simple as loading the Arachne Objects by Places RDF file into 4store the same way I did nomisma and running the same SPARQL query. Cost: 5 minutes. Now I know about 29 objects in the Arachne database that they think are related to Akragas/Agrigentum. For example:
- 41149: Sarkophag mit dem Hippolytosmythos (Agrigent, S. Nicola):
- 75: Statue des Apollon (Agrigent, Museo Civico): http://arachne.uni-koeln.de/entity/1060434 == http://arachne.uni-koeln.de/item/objekt/75
- 75000: Atlant des Olympieions von Agrigent (Akragas, Agrigentum, Agrigento): http://arachne.uni-koeln.de/entity/1111253 == http://arachne.uni-koeln.de/item/objekt/75000
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