Beyond HREF<a rel="dcterms:creator" href="http://viaf.org/viaf/220831018">Sebastian Heath</a>

Slides shown alongside my presentation to the NEH-Funded “Linked Ancient World Data Institute”.

Except for the screen captures, quotes and anything else not original, the content here is ©2012 The Author, released under a CC0 license.

Finally, we stress that it is not our intent to ask LAWDI participants to adhere to a single standard that dictates how each project and discipline brings its intellectual content into digital form. We recognize that existing data is heterogeneous and that many digital humanities projects have invested substantial time and money in creating resources according to their own needs. In this environment, any attempt to create a single unifying standard of data representation will fail and so we have not adopted that language in this proposal. We are also sensitive to the principle that overly detailed standards presume that a discipline knows all that it wants to say about its topic of study. This is certainly not the case for the Ancient World, where the basic terms of analysis continue to change in exciting ways. Of course, recognizing complexity as the starting point of discussions does not mean that useful interoperability cannot be achieved.

From the proposal submitted to the @NEH_ODH

Linked Data is about using the Web to connect related data that wasn't previously linked, or using the Web to lower the barriers to linking data currently linked using other methods. More specifically, Wikipedia defines Linked Data as "a term used to describe a recommended best practice for exposing, sharing, and connecting pieces of data, information, and knowledge on the Semantic Web using URIs and RDF."

linking data

Text

Click on the screen capture. Then, hover over “Mozia” in the sentence beginning “See linked

data...” for an example of turning links to stable entities into a user experience.

Nomisma.org is “Under Construction” but does show further examples of using the Internet to gather a

distributed definition of a concept such as a hoard of Greek coins. But again, stability of web addresses is key.

Linked Data is about using the Web to connect related data that wasn't previously linked, or using the Web to lower the barriers to linking data currently linked using other methods. More specifically, Wikipedia defines Linked Data as "a term used to describe a recommended best practice for exposing, sharing, and connecting pieces of data, information, and knowledge on the Semantic Web using URIs and RDF."

If you go to that page, there’s a link to “RDFa Triples (Turtle)”. We care not just about stable URIs, but also

about having automatically parsable content accessible at those stable URIs.

“The assertion of an RDF triple says that some relationship, indicated by the predicate, holds between the things denoted by subject and object of the triple.”<http://www.w3.org/TR/rdf11-concepts/>

Subject ObjectPredicate

nm:denariusnm:denomination

“nm:” = “http://nomisma.org/id/”

nm:rrc-525.4a “Denarius”nm:denomination

nm:rrc-525.4a

NOTE: You *REALLY* want URIs in all three positions if good ones exist.

“Now many people will tell you (indeed I probably will too) that you need to distinguish the statements you make about the thing in the real world from the statements about the document. For example, a URI for me might return a document with some information about me, but the creation date for that document and the creation date for me are two different things. And because you donʼt want to get confused itʼs better to have a URI for the thing and another one for the document making assertions about the thing. Make sense?”<http://derivadow.com/2010/07/01/linked-things/>

Text

http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n79033006 is the URI - aka identifier - for the the subject “Augustus”.

Go to that link and you’ll see “.html” appended in the address bar. That’s an example of redirecting from an

abstract identifier to an actual document on the Internet with content about the identified concept.

The issue of “identifiers” and “content about what those identifiers identify” falls under the rubric of

“HTPP Issue 57” (originally issue 14). Note that it is “OPEN” and there is room for those of us in the

Digital Humanities community to speak our minds. Particularly, is the current language around Issue #57

useful for/enabling of what we are trying to do? I suspect many will find that it just isn’t.

“Information is always a measure of the decrease of uncertainty at a receiver.”

http://www.lecb.ncifcrf.gov/~toms/information.is.not.uncertainty.html

I quote this as a useful principle that can get a conversation started. I strive to put information on the Internet in such a way that upon transmission, both soft-tissue processors - “Brains” - and silicon/

other agents can make use of it.