LinkedHumanities - Linking and Populating the Digital Humanities

• Applicant: Professor Mathias Niepert, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: History of Philosophy
• Term: from 2011 to 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 198846898

The goals of the proposed LinkedHumanities project are to create and maintain data integration tools tailored to digital humanities collections in order to build a machine-readable web of facts[18, 19] about philosophy. The tools will interconnect structured digital representations of the humanities and leverage the created links to enrich the respective data repositories. Application testbeds include the Indiana Philosophy Ontology (InPhO) project and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP). The specific outcomes of this proposal will be (a) the implementation of a linking service between the InPhO ontology and other knowledge repositories such as DBPedia and Freebase; and (b) the population of the InPhO ontology by leveraging the previously created links to other data repositories. Most importantly, however, the data integration tools will be designed to also serve the needs of other digital humanities projects. The InPhO1 project succeeded in creating and maintaining a “dynamic ontology” of philosophy. The ontology is used for novel browsing and exploration interfaces and is openly available through an easily accessible API and OWL dumps. To leverage the full potential of the knowledge base, the LinkedHumanities project will semantically link it to other existing machine-readable data repositories. The integration with other repositories will allow us and other digital humanities projects to aggregate and complete their data and use it in novel digital humanities applications. Significance and broader impacts: The LinkedHumanities project has the potential to enhance scholarship and learning by (a) providing the data backbone of InPhO’s search and exploration interfaces; and (b) making digital humanities data available by integrating it with the linked open data cloud. Through InPhO’s improved search interfaces we reach the scholars, students, and members of the public who are downloading over 800,000 SEP entries each week. We will make the data integration tools and the created semantic links freely available on the Web. This will encourage others to use our data within novel digital humanities projects; to build tools for (semi-)automatically interlinking and populating digital humanities data; and to spark discussion of the prospects and dangers of open linked data in the humanities. Due to the visibility of the InPhO project, we expect LinkedHumanities to also inform other digital humanities projects.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• International Connection: USA
• Participating Institution: National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)
• Cooperation Partner: Professor Dr. Colin Frederick Allen