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Building Linked Open Date Entities for Historical Research

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Metadata and Semantic Research (MTSR 2020)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1355))

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Abstract

Time is a focal point for historical research. Although existing Linked Open Data (LOD) resources hold time entities, they are often limited to modern period and year-month precision at most. Therefore, researchers are currently unable to execute co-reference resolution through entity linking to integrate different datasets which contain information on the day level or remote past. This paper aims to build an RDF model and lookup service for historical time at the lowest granularity level of a single day at a specific point in time, for the duration of 6000 years. The project, Linked Open Date Entities (LODE), generates stable URIs for over 2.2 million entities, which include essential information and links to other LOD resources. The value of date entities is discussed in a couple of use cases with existing datasets. LODE facilitates improved access and connectivity to unlock the potential for the data integration in interdisciplinary research.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://perio.do (accessed July 20, 2020).

  2. 2.

    See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_years. (accessed July 20, 2020).

  3. 3.

    Currently the lower and upper limit would be 9564 BC and AD 3000.

  4. 4.

    A SPARQL query only returns 218 hits between AD 1 to AD 1600, while 5041 entities are found between AD 1600 and 2020.

  5. 5.

    A SPARQL query returns no hit before October 15 1582 (on the day when the Gregorian calendar was first adopted), and only returns 159691 hits between AD 1 to AD 2020.

  6. 6.

    For example, rare cases include https://babelnet.org/synset?word=bn:14549660n&details=1&lang=EN. (accessed July 20, 2020).

  7. 7.

    https://www.w3.org/TR/owl-time/ (accessed July 20, 2020).

  8. 8.

    https://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-owl-time-20060927/ (accessed July 20, 2020).

  9. 9.

    https://www.cidoc-crm.org/ (accessed July 20, 2020).

  10. 10.

    The DPLA Metadata Application Profile (MAP) also uses edm:TimeSpan (https://pro.dp.la/hubs/metadata-application-profile) (accessed July 20, 2020).

  11. 11.

    See an example record at https://www.europeana.eu/portal/en/record/9200434/oai_baa_onb_at_8984183.html. For example, https://semium.org/time/1900 represents AD 1900. (accessed July 20, 2020).

  12. 12.

    https://jpsearch.go.jp/ (accessed July 20, 2020).

  13. 13.

    https://www.kanzaki.com/works/ld/jpsearch/primer/ (accessed July 20, 2020).

  14. 14.

    https://anno.onb.ac.at/ (accessed July 20, 2020).

  15. 15.

    https://www.stefanzweig.digital (accessed July 20, 2020).

  16. 16.

    However, there would be a problem, because it sets January 1 as the value of xsd:dateTime for a time interval entity (e.g. 1987 is represented as 1987–01-01T00:00:00Z).

  17. 17.

    Materialiastion is the term used in Semantic Web to generate graphs based on inferences. Implicit knowledge is materialised in order to make it explicit for the purpose of query performance.

  18. 18.

    For instance, https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q2432 represents AD 1984.

  19. 19.

    Full details are available at https://vocabs.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/date/ together with the syntax principles.

  20. 20.

    See https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T94064. There are confusing specifications in XML Schema Part 2: Datatypes Second Edition (https://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/#isoformats), XML Schema Definition Language (XSD) 1.1 Part 2: Datatypes (https://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema11-2/#dateTime), and the HTML living standard (https://html.spec.whatwg.org/#global-dates-and-times). (accessed July 20, 2020).

  21. 21.

    As seen in Wikidata (https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q25299). (accessed July 20, 2020).

  22. 22.

    For example, “196” means the 1960s, and “19” is the 19th century. They should not be confused with “0196” (AD 196) and “0019” (AD 19). Years less than 5 digits must be expressed in exactly 4 digits.

  23. 23.

    https://metacpan.org/pod/DateTime (accessed July 20, 2020).

  24. 24.

    https://www.w3.org/TR/skos-reference/ (accessed July 20, 2020).

  25. 25.

    For example, a popular usage is that a decade starts from a year ending in a 0 to a year ending in a 9, while a decade starts from a year ending in a 1 to a year ending in a 0 in a rarer version. Wikidata adopts the former, resulting the 0s and 0s BC consisting of only 9 years. A similar conflict of constructs exists for the use of century.

  26. 26.

    https://skosmos.org/ (accessed July 20, 2020).

  27. 27.

    https://www.rekihaku.ac.jp/up-cgi/login.pl?p=param/ita2/db_param (accessed July 20, 2020).

  28. 28.

    https://schnitzler-lod.acdh-dev.oeaw.ac.at/about.html (accessed July 20, 2020).

  29. 29.

    https://pmb.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/ (accessed July 20, 2020).

  30. 30.

    https://www.researchspace.org/ (accessed July 20, 2020).

  31. 31.

    As Wikipedia is not LOD, only links to Wikipedia articles are shown and clickable.

  32. 32.

    https://tei-c.org/ (accessed July 20, 2020).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Sonnenfelsgasse 19, Vienna, Austria

    Go Sugimoto

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  1. Go Sugimoto
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Correspondence to Go Sugimoto .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. International Hellenic University, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Emmanouel Garoufallou

  2. Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain

    María-Antonia Ovalle-Perandones

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Sugimoto, G. (2021). Building Linked Open Date Entities for Historical Research. In: Garoufallou, E., Ovalle-Perandones, MA. (eds) Metadata and Semantic Research. MTSR 2020. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1355. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71903-6_30

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71903-6_30

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