Inference and Linking on the Humanist’s Semantic Web

Abstract

<jats:p>The Semantic Web promises that the pools of semantic data it interweaves together will enable people to find information that they could not otherwise find by revealing knowledge not explicitly visible in the distributed source data. In order for this promise to be fulfilled within the humanities, the Semantic Web data being created must have certain features, but what are they? This article provides some background on Semantic Web inferencing and then argues that there are three things that humanists can do to prepare their data to participant in this sort of inference generation: add more data, reciprocate links across repositories, and add metadata specifically to support inferencing.</jats:p>

The Seventies Sociality: Activist Publishers and the Digital Commonplacing of New Knowledge

“…As John Simpson and Susan Brown pointed out at the 2014 INKE conference, linked data only makes up 1% of the web, and much of that 1% is used for commercial rather than scholarly purposes (Simpson and Brown 2014). The conversion of existing digital humanities data into linked data would offer humanities scholars an opportunity to intervene in the semantic web as it is being built.…”

“…Despite calls in the digital humanities for TEI-linked data compatibility (Simpson and Brown 2014;Ciotti and Tomasi 2016), scholars have yet to develop best practices for creating linked data from richly encoded TEI resources. For many projects, the production of linked data is an ancillary goal-one that would be gratifying to achieve, but that is secondary to the encoding itself, or one that is only necessary to facilitate aggregation.…”