Abstract
Libraries as a type of social institution have a long history of collecting, preserving and spreading the knowledge of mankind and have cumulated a vast amount of highly structured data conforming to library and information standards. Among these data, especially, name authority data are fundamentally important for digital humanities. However, traditional library data are not built in the way that digital humanities research requires, which makes it difficult for digital humanities researchers to use them directly. This study is to address this problem through using the Linked Data approach to build knowledge bases in transforming and normalizing name authority data into the format that can be easily deployed by digital humanities research. A name authority database was built on various sources and formed the content infrastructure to provide Linked Open Data services, which enables sophisticated searches and uses of document resources knowledge base with multiple types of documents and multimedia, instead of digital collections with only a keyword search function. The process of design and development as well as the way through which resources are interlinked are described in detail in this paper.
References
American Council of Learned Societies. (2006). Our cultural Commonwealth: The report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences. Retrieved from http://www.acls.org/uploadedFiles/Publications/Programs/Our_Cultural_Commonwealth.pdf
Hannemann, J., & Kett, J. (2010). World Library and Information Congress: 79th IFLA General Conference and Assembly. In Proceedings of the world library and information congress (pp. 1–11). Gothenburge, Sweden.
Harvard University, Academia Sinica, & Peking University. (2018). Chinese Biographical Database. Retrieved April 19, 2018, from https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/cbdb/how-cbdb-collects-data-and-why-you-do-not-always-find-what-you-want
Kuhn, T. S. (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Library of Congress. (2016). Overview of the BIBFRAME 2.0 Model [webpage]. Retrieved April 11, 2018, from http://www.loc.gov/bibframe/docs/bibframe2-model.html
Neubert, J., & Tochtermann, K. (2012). Linked Library Data: Offering a Backbone for the Semantic Web. In D. Lukose, A. R. Ahmad, & A. Suliman (Eds.), Knowledge Technology (Vol. 295, pp. 37–45). Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-32826-8_4
OCLC. (2012). VIAF (The Virtual International Authority File). Retrieved April 11, 2018, from https://www.oclc.org/research/activities/viaf.html
Papadakis, I., Kyprianos, K., & Stefanidakis, M. (2015). Linked Data URIs and Libraries: The Story So Far. D-Lib Magazine, 21(5/6). https://doi.org/10.1045/may2015-papadakis
Riva, P., Bœuf, P. L., & Žumer, M. (2017). IFLA Library Reference Model A Conceptual Model for Bibliographic Information. International Federation of Library Assoications and Institutions, 101.
Schich, M., Song, C., Ahn, Y.-Y., Mirsky, A., Martino, M., Barabasi, A.-L., & Helbing, D. (2014). A network framework of cultural history. Science, 345(6196), 558–562. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1240064
Smith-Yoshimura, K., & Michelson, D. (2013, March 27). Irreconcilable differences? Name authority control & humanities scholarship – Hanging Together. Retrieved April 19, 2018, from http://hangingtogether.org/?p=2621
Xia C. (2017). Building a Digital Humanities Platform by Using Linked Open Data Services. Journal of Library and Information Science, 43(1), 47–70.
Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and the initial publication in this journal.
Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the nonexclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).