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Re-evaluating the Eleventh Century through Linked Events and Entities

…and how we are abusing WissKI to do this

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2021–2026: ERC project RELEVEN

People and Movement

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Place and Space

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Textual Culture

Re-evaluating the Eleventh Century!

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2021–2026: ERC project RELEVEN

  • University of Vienna and Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage
  • Team Uni Wien: Tara Andrews, Katalin Prajda, Márton Rózsa, Aleksandar Anđelović, Lewis Read
  • Team ACDH-CH: Lukas Plank, Kevin Stadler, Katharina Wünsche
  • Admin and outreach: Lale Tüver

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https://releven.univie.ac.at/

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The STAR model (Structured Assertion Record)

  • What historians want to know when they encounter “facts”: who is saying this (authority), and on what basis (source/provenance)?�
  • This is how we establish that information can (or can’t) be relied upon.

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The STAR model (Structured Assertion Record)

Subject

Object

Predicate

Who claims this? (Authority)

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On what grounds? (Provenance)

SUBJECT: Hervé Frangopoulos

PREDICATE: died (was executed) in

OBJECT: 1063–1064 (512 of the Armenian era)

The generic LOD model

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The STAR model (Structured Assertion Record)

Subject

Object

Predicate

Evidence

Authority

Assertion

Extending the generic LOD model

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STAR model and existing standards

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CIDOC-CRM versions >= 7.1.2

  • Assertions are E13 Attribute Assignments
  • All defined properties (predicates) can be instantiated as E55 Type

LRMoo version 1.0

  • Representation of textual source material
  • …including information about creation of texts

CRMdig version 4.0

  • Representation of provenance of assertion structures
  • Software runs, information extracted from WissKI DB

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The STAR model (Structured Assertion Record)

Subject – crm:E1 Entity

Object – crm:E1 Entity

Predicate – crm:P*

Evidence – crm:E1 Entity

Authority – crm:E39 Actor

Assertion- crm:E13 Attribute Assignment

Extending the generic LOD model

Documentation – crm:E31 Document

P140

P141

P177

P14

P17

P70

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The STAR model (Structured Assertion Record)

E69 Death

of Frangopoulos

E52 Time-Span�c. 1063

P4�has time-span

E21 Person�Matthew of Edessa

Assertion

Chronicle, II.19

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The STAR model (Structured Assertion Record)

E69 Death

of Frangopoulos

E52 Time-Span�c. 1063

P4�has time-span

E21 Person�Matthew of Edessa

Assertion

E55 Type�Execution

P2�has type

Assertion

Chronicle, II.19

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The STAR model (Structured Assertion Record)

E69 Death

E52 Timespan�after Aug 1071

P4�has time span

E34 Inscription

Seal #404

E21 Person�Werner Seibt

Assertion

E31 Document

Seibt, SBS 10, 89–96

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Why WissKI?

In search of a data entry system that works

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Why WissKI?

Possible data entry methods:

  • Scraping scripts that prepare the triples automatically
  • Endless spreadsheets

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Why WissKI?

Possible data entry methods:

  • Scraping scripts that prepare the triples automatically
  • Endless spreadsheets 😱
  • Web forms structured to hold our data

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Why WissKI?

Possible data entry methods:

  • Scraping scripts that prepare the triples automatically
  • Endless spreadsheets 😱
  • Web forms structured to hold our data

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Why WissKI?

Possible data entry methods:

  • Scraping scripts that prepare the triples automatically
  • Endless spreadsheets 😱
  • Web forms structured to hold our data
    • Nodegoat
    • ResearchSpace
    • WissKI

Everything is an assertion and we are not using standard paths!

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Why WissKI?

Possible data entry methods:

  • Scraping scripts that prepare the triples automatically
  • Endless spreadsheets 😱
  • Web forms structured to hold our data
    • Nodegoat
    • ResearchSpace
    • WissKI

Everything is an assertion and we are not using standard paths!

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Abusing WissKI to get our work done

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Abusing the model to get WissKI to work

  • So many subclasses. So many.
  • WissKI can’t filter by e.g. P2 has type properties on objects
  • …thus we need subclasses to prevent the possibility of a manuscript having produced a lead seal, or a boulloterion bearing a colophon.
  • Many data collections and modelling practices make heavy use of P2 and this could be a barrier for their adopting a system like WissKI.

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Where abuse isn’t enough

  • Sibling classes (e.g. Manuscript and Boulloterion) that need the same information (as E22 Human-Made Object); how to do this without a huge amount of manual path recreation?
  • Paths that need superclasses, e.g. our Authorities – at the moment we have this ugly construct for every single assertion type.

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Ending with something kind of awesome

  • https://github.com/acdh-oeaw/wisski2rdfproxy
  • Under development by Lukas Plank and Kevin Stadler
  • Intended to enable us to use WissKI’s API as a backend for pulling our data into non-Drupal websites
  • Watch this space!

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22-Nov-24