Rob Warren gave a presentation at Curtin University, Australia, as part of their Adventures in Culture and Technology Series.
Ask not what you can do for Linked Open Data but what Linked Open Data can do for you
Digital Humanities scholars have long been hampered by the twin problems of getting the data into digital form and then managing ever-increasing amounts of it. Too often, the data behind the research becomes prisoner of a ‘research portal’ or is lost on someone’s laptop. In many ways the most successful data management tool so far is the spreadsheet – a 40 year-old technology!
This talk is about linked open data, or the semantic web, an approach to the management of data that is showing promise for researchers, libraries and archives. The talk is non-technical and focuses on explaining how real-world research data problems can be solved. These include the identity of historical persons, dealing with incomplete or false data; identifying or referencing lost geographical locations and encouraging the serendipitous reuse of data in other projects.
Real-world examples of problematic data from the Great War will be shown from the Muninn Project and the solutions using linked open data approaches.