Using Biographical Texts as Linked Data for Prosopographical Research and Applications

Abstract

This paper argues that representing texts as semantic Linked Data provides a useful basis for analyzing their contents in Digital Humanities research and for Cultural Heritage application development. The idea is to transform Cultural Heritage texts into a knowledge graph and a Linked Data service that can be used flexibly in different applications via a SPARQL endpoint. The argument is discussed and evaluated in the context of biographical and prosopographical research and a case study where over 13 000 life stories of the National Biography of Finland were transformed into RDF, enriched by data linking, and published in a SPARQL endpoint. Tools for biography and prosopography, data clustering, network analysis, and linguistic analysis were created with promising first results.

Visualizing and Analyzing Networks of Named Entities in Biographical Dictionaries for Digital Humanities Research

“…Unlike in LinkedJazz, the view shows all relations and how a person is referenced throughout time to show how a person's work influences person's contemporaries and other generations of notable people. The view is constructed using text that has been transformed into RDF [35] and by quering the sentences with manually crafted links from the SPARQL service.…”

“…There are furthermore 225 000 lifetime events of the protagonists including their births, deaths, and other biographical events. The biographical texts also contain manually added 31 500 HTML links links between the biographs that were included in the knowledge base [35]. There is also a separate graph of 4970 places, extracted from the Finnish Gazetteer of Historical Places and Maps (Hipla) and data service 7 [17,14].…”

“…The data was also augmented with a list of countries in the world and their capitals. [21] Extraction and Linking Process The biographical texts [35] were transformed into an RDF dataset and enriched with linguistic information, totaling in 120 million triples. The data can be queried from a SPARQL endpoint.…”

“…The idea is to explain edges by providing the user with the sentences is which the references to other people are mentioned. 14 The sentences can be retrieved from the linguistic graph of the underlying SPARQL endpoint [35]. The references have been divided into two groups: 1) Sentences in other bios that make a reference to the protagonist's biography.…”

“…BiographySampo 3 is a semantic portal that is based on a knowledge graph that has been created using natural language processing methods, linked data, and semantic web technologies [15,35]. The graph contains currently ca.…”