ELAG 2014 Workshop. Bath, UK. 11–12th June 2014

Adrian Stevenson and Jane StevensonMimas, University of Manchester, UK@adrianstevenson @janestevenson

Linking Data with sameAs: Challenges and Solutions

Linking Lives

• An interface to biographical data, using– the Archives Hub– VIAF– DBPedia– the British National Biography (BNB)– Copac

• http://archiveshub.ac.uk/linkinglives/

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owl:sameAs

<Archives Hub Person> owl:sameAs <VIAF Person>

<http://data.archiveshub.ac.uk/id/person/nra/webbmarthabeatrice1858-1943socialreformer>

owl:sameAs

<http://viaf.org/viaf/86607236> .

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http://data.archiveshub.ac.uk/id/person/nra/webbmarthabeatrice1858-1943socialreformerfoaf:familyName + foaf:givenName + hub:dates

“Webb, Martha Beatrice, 1858-1943”

http://viaf.org/viaf/86607236/foaf:name

“Webb, Martha Beatrice, 1858-1943”

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Matching

• LOD Refine• http://code.zemanta.com/sparkica/download.html

• SILK Framework• http://wifo5-03.informatik.uni-mannheim.de/bizer/

silk/#workbench

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LOD Refine

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SILK

Comments on the workshop

• ‘great lead-through on LOD refine’• LOD Refine and Silk seem to be workable tools

for creating sameAs triples that can help matching

• ‘purpose and possibilities of Silk perhaps a little rushed for me’

• ‘made me realize how disconnected my concept of Silk restrictions and Sparql was. This is now fixed. Ta!’

Comments on Linking Lives

• ‘Great to see the British National Biography (BNB) being used’

• Linking Lives project shows the need for more open data!’

• ‘We need robust Sparql endpoints!’

Comments…

• ‘Funny how hard it is to find useful stuff to link to, and how the user is to make sense of it’.

• ‘I feel reconciled!’• ‘Linking = hard work’

Challenges

Identifying entities: • One of the main problems we came up with in

our linked data pilot connecting library catalogue data and theatre performance data was the lack of identifiers for people and works

• String matching on personal names and work titles in legacy heterogenous systems is extremely important

Challenges

• Question is how to match work titles in multiple languages.