WW1LOD: an application of CIDOC-CRM to World War 1 linked data

Abstract

The CIDOC-CRM standard indicates that common events, actors, places and timeframes are important in linking together cultural material, and provides a framework for describing them. However, merely describing entities in this way in two datasets does not yet interlink them. To do that, the identities of instances still need to be either reconciled, or be based on a shared vocabulary.The WW1LOD dataset presented in this paper was created to facilitate both of these approaches for collections dealing with the First World War. For this purpose, the dataset includes events, places, agents, times, keywords, and themes related to the war, based on over ten different authoritative data sources from providers such as the Imperial War Museum. The content is harmonized into RDF, and published as a Linked Open Data service.While generally basing on CIDOC-CRM, some modeling choices used also deviate from it where our experience dictated such. In the article, these deviations are discussed in the hope that they may serve as examples where CIDOC-CRM itself may warrant further examination.As a demonstration of use, the dataset and online service have been used to create a contextual reader application that is able link together and pull in information related to WW1 from e.g.

Modeling and Using an Actor Ontology of Second World War Military Units and Personnel

“…There are several projects publishing linked data about the World War I on the web, such as Europeana Collections 1914Collections -1918Collections 36 , 1914Collections -1918 Online 37 , WW1 Discovery 38 , Out of the Trenches 39 , Muninn [19], and WW1LOD [15]. There are few works that use the Linked Data approach to World War II, such as [3,1], Defence of Britain 40 , and Open Memory Project 41 .…”

Digital Heritage. Progress in Cultural Heritage: Documentation, Preservation, and Protection

“…Other general-purpose metadata schemas in the cultural heritage domain [32], Out of the Trenches [59], and WW1LOD [152].…”

“…WW1LOD [152] uses a CIDOC CRM-based modeling of WW1 military history, containing information about events, actors, historical places, times, population statistics, keywords, and themes relating to the war. The main modeling rationales are: 1) Use existing established ontologies (especially CRM), 2) Model similar data uniformly, 3) Strive to model data intuitively, 4) Don't lose information included in the original source dataset.…”

“…Although the Semantic Web technologies are widely adopted in the whole cultural heritage domain [87], they have not been used much in the field of military history. Projects have created and published Linked Data about the domain, e.g., [216,53,152,28], but this generally focuses on historical collection metadata, instead of actually representing the events and narratives of wars. In addition, the Linked Data projects have focused more on the First World War (WW1), instead of the more global, complex, and recent WW2, except in the domain of holocaust studies [15].…”

A catch 22 of 3D data sustainability: Lessons in 3D archaeological data management & accessibility

“…org/ ) (Bruseker and Carboni, 2015). CRM has been implemented at the British Museum and German Archaeological Institute, as well as various European Union projects (e.g., Guillen et al, 2015;Makela et al, 2016), and also the Text Database and Dictionary of Classic Mayan at University of Bonn ( https://www.sub.uni-goettingen.de/en/projects-research/ project-details/projekt/text-database-and-dictionary-of-classic-mayan/ ). Because the CRM ontology makes the data semantically intelligent, it expands the interoperability of the mapped data with other databases and so it will ensure accessibility of the data long into the future.…”