Getting down with LOD tools at the 2nd CLARIAH Linked Data workshop

[cross-post from clariah.nl]

On Tuesday 13 June 2017, the second CLARIAH Linked Data workshop took place. After the first workshop in September which was very much an introduction to Linked Data to the CLARIAH community, we wanted to organise a more hands-on workshop where researchers, curators and developers could get their hands dirty.

The main goal of the workshop was to introduce relevant tools to novice as well as more advanced users. After a short plenary introduction, we therefore split up the group where for the novice users the focus was on tools that are accompanied by a graphical user interface, like OpenRefine and Gephi; whereas we demonstrated API-based tools to the advanced users, such as the CLARIAH-incubated COW, grlc, Cultuurlink and ANANSI. Our setup, namely to have the participants convert their own dataset to Linked Data and query and visualise, was somewhat ambitious as we had not taken into account all data formats or encodings. Overall, participants were able to get started with some data, and ask questions specific to their use cases.

It is impossible to fully clean and convert and analyse a dataset in a single day, so the CLARIAH team will keep investigating ways to support researchers with their Linked Data needs. For now, you can check out the CultuurLink slides and tutorial materials from the workshop and keep an eye out on this website for future CLARIAH LOD events.

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Connecting collections across national borders

Items from two collections shown side-by-sideAs audiovisual archives are digitizing their collections and making these collections available online, the need arises to also establish connections between different collections and to allow for cross-collection search and browsing. Structured vocabularies can be used as connecting points by aligning thesauri from different institutions. The project “Gemeenschappelijke Thesaurus voor Uniforme Ontsluiting” was funded by the Taalunie -a cross-national organization focusing on the Dutch language- and executed by the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and the Flemish VIAA archive. It involved a case study where partial collections of the two archives were connected by aligning their thesauri. This involved the conversion of the VRT thesaurus to the SKOS format and linking it to Sound and Vision’s GTAA thesaurus.cultuurlink screenshotThe interactive alignment tool CultuurLINK, made by Dutch company Spinque was used to align the two thesauri (see the screenshot above).

 

The links between the collections can be explored using a cross-collection browser, also built by Spinque. This allows users to search and explore connections between the two collections. Unfortunately, the collections are not publicly available so the demonstrator is password-protected, but a publicly accessible screencast (below) shows the functionalities.

The full report can be accessed through the VIAA site. There, you can also find a blog post in Dutch.

Update: a paper about this has been accepted for publication:

  • Victor de Boer, Matthias Priem, Michiel Hildebrand, Nico Verplancke, Arjen de Vries and Johan Oomen. Exploring Audiovisual Archives through Aligned Thesauri. To appear in Proceedings of 10th Metadata and Semantics Research Conference. [Draft PDF]

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CultuurLINK Linking Award

Happy and suprised to find the first (and so far only) CultuurLink Linking Award in my mail box yesterday! I checked with the nice people over at Spinque.com and it turns out it was a token of appreciation for being a prolific Cultuurlink user 🙂

I think the vocabulary alignment tool is great and easy to work with, so I can recommend it to anyone with a SKOS vocabulary who wants to match it with any of the major cultural thesauri in the ‘Hub’. Thanks to the people at Spinque for the great tool and the nice gesture!

spinqeprijs

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