Linked Open Data Vocabularies and Identifiers for Medieval Studies

Toby Burrows (1) , Antoine Brix (2) , Doug Emery (3) , Arthur Mitchell Fraas (3) , Eero Hyvönen (4) , Esko Ikkala (5) , Mikko Koho (5) , David Lewis (1) , Synnøve Myking (6) , Kevin Page (1) , Lynn Ransom (3) , Emma Cawlfield-Thomson (3) , Jouni Tuominen (4) , Hanno Wijsman (7) , Pip Willcox (1)

1 University of Oxford
2 UCL - Université Catholique de Louvain = Catholic University of Louvain
3 University of Pennsylvania
4 SeCo - Semantic Computing Research Group [Helsinki]
5 Aalto University
6 UiB - University of Bergen
7 IRHT - Institut de recherche et d'histoire des textes

This paper examines the use of Linked Open Data in the research field of medieval studies. We report on a survey of common identifiers and vocabularies used across digitized medieval resources, with a focus on three internationally significant collections in the field. This survey has been undertaken within the “Mapping Manuscript Migrations” (MMM) project since 2017, aimed at aggregating and linking disparate datasets relating to the history of medieval manuscripts. This has included reconciliation and matching of data for five main classes of entities: Persons, Places, Organizations, Works, and Manuscripts. For each of these classes, we review the identifiers used in MMM’s source datasets, and note the way in which they tend to rely on generic vocabularies rather than specialist medieval ones. As well as discussing some of the major issues and difficulties involved in conceptualizing each of these types of entity in a medieval context, we suggest some possible directions for building a more specialized Linked Open Data environment for medieval studies in the future.

Domains: History

Toby Burrows, Antoine Brix, Doug Emery, Arthur Mitchell Fraas, Eero Hyvönen, et al.. Linked Open Data Vocabularies and Identifiers for Medieval Studies. CEUR Workshop Proceedings, 2020, DHN 2020: Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries: Proceedings of the Digital Humanities in the Nordic Countries 5th Conference, Riga, Latvia, 21-23 October 2020, 2612, pp.short 5. ⟨halshs-04361491⟩