LODE: Linking Digital Humanities Content to the Web of Data

TL;DR

LODE is a framework that enables digital humanities scholars to easily enrich and link their local RDF data with high-quality data from the Linked Open Data cloud through user-friendly interfaces and matching algorithms.

Contribution

The paper introduces the LODE framework, a tool that simplifies RDF data enrichment and linking for non-technical users in digital humanities.

Findings

LODE effectively supports non-technical users in data enrichment.

LODE provides high-quality linking suggestions using tailored algorithms.

The framework integrates seamlessly with existing digital humanities workflows.

Abstract

Numerous digital humanities projects maintain their data collections in the form of text, images, and metadata. While data may be stored in many formats, from plain text to XML to relational databases, the use of the resource description framework (RDF) as a standardized representation has gained considerable traction during the last five years. Almost every digital humanities meeting has at least one session concerned with the topic of digital humanities, RDF, and linked data. While most existing work in linked data has focused on improving algorithms for entity matching, the aim of the LinkedHumanities project is to build digital humanities tools that work "out of the box," enabling their use by humanities scholars, computer scientists, librarians, and information scientists alike. With this paper, we report on the Linked Open Data Enhancer (LODE) framework developed as part of the LinkedHumanities project. With LODE we support non-technical users to enrich a local RDF repository with high-quality data from the Linked Open Data cloud. LODE links and enhances the local RDF repository without compromising the quality of the data. In particular, LODE supports the user in the enhancement and linking process by providing intuitive user-interfaces and by suggesting high-quality linking candidates using tailored matching algorithms. We hope that the LODE framework will be useful to digital humanities scholars complementing other digital humanities tools.