Knowledge Graphs in the Libraries and Digital Humanities Domain

TL;DR

This paper explores the development and application of knowledge graphs in libraries and digital humanities, highlighting their role in resource discovery, navigation, and connecting scholarly insights within a decentralized, web-based knowledge network.

Contribution

It provides an overview of how knowledge graphs are rooted in traditional knowledge organization systems and their evolution through digital transformation and Web integration.

Findings

Knowledge graphs support resource discovery and visualization.

They are rooted in traditional knowledge organization systems.

Future potential includes formalizing scholarly findings from large corpora.

Abstract

Knowledge graphs represent concepts (e.g., people, places, events) and their semantic relationships. As a data structure, they underpin a digital information system, support users in resource discovery and retrieval, and are useful for navigation and visualization purposes. Within the libaries and humanities domain, knowledge graphs are typically rooted in knowledge organization systems, which have a century-old tradition and have undergone their digital transformation with the advent of the Web and Linked Data. Being exposed to the Web, metadata and concept definitions are now forming an interconnected and decentralized global knowledge network that can be curated and enriched by community-driven editorial processes. In the future, knowledge graphs could be vehicles for formalizing and connecting findings and insights derived from the analysis of possibly large-scale corpora in the libraries and digital humanities domain.