20130711 linked datascholarship_madrid

co-funded by the European Union
Linked Data Scholarship:
Modeling and Interpretation in the Digital Humanities
Prof. Dr. Stefan Gradmann (KU Leuven)
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, 11/07/2013

Linked Data Scholarship: Modeling and Interpretation in the Digital Humanities
Stefan Gradmann, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, 11/07/2013
2
Overview
An Introduction to RDF (?)
DM2E
The Scholarly Domain Model
What IS a model, anyway?
The Wittgenstein Incubator

3
The Web of Documents
Information
Management:
A Proposal
(TBL, 1989)
... twice
extended:
•in syntax
•in scope

4
Resources and Links
in the Document Web
We have HTTP URIs to identify resources and links between them – but we
are missing a few things!
What kinds of resources are 'Louvre.html' and 'LaJoconde.jpg'?
A machine cannot tell.
Humans can: we recognize implied context!
How exactly do they relate to each other?
A machine cannot tell.
Humans can: again we recognize implied context!

5
Syntactically Extending the
Document Web (1)
We add a syntax for making statements on resources: RDF triples
We add a schema language (RDFS) with elements such as
classes (chair' as instance of chairs),
hierarchies of classes and properties (chairs are a subclass of
furniture, 'teaches' is a sub-property of 'communicates')
inheritance (communication based on language → teaching also is)
support for basic inferencing, deterministic logical operations

6
Syntactically Extending the
Document Web: RDF (2)
And thus are able to establish structures in triple aggregations
resulting in lightweight domain ontologies:

7
Extending the Web in Scope:
The Web of Things … (slightly Mistaken)
Taken from Ronald Carpentier's
Blog at
What's wrong
with this picture?

8
… and the Way we extend the Web in
scope to make it a 'Web of Things'

9
And we get … Linked Data
Copyright © 2008 W3C (MIT, ERCIM, Keio)
http://www.w3.org/2008/Talks/0617-lod-tbl/#(4)
Standard Identifiers
Standard Pointers
Standards for Queries
and Statements
Link to Context

10
A few Bubbles: 5/2007
Over 500 million RDF triples
Around 120,000 RDF links between data sources © Richard Cyganiak

11
And a lot of Bubbles as of last Year

12
Google entering the Floor

13
Modelling Object Representations as RDF
Aggregations generates new questions ...
Where do resource
aggregations 'start'?
Where do they 'end'?
And what constitutes
document
boundaries??
And which node was
connected to which
one at a given
time???
→ Provenance,
Versioning,
Authorisation: Named
Graphs
A
B
C

14
Aggregations and Context:
Calculating Closeness

15
… and new opportunities:
Triple Sets and 'Reasoning'

16
02/2012-01/2015
Co-funded by the EC

17
Digitised Manuscripts to
Europeana (DM2E): Who (1)?
• Content Providers
– European Association for Jewish Culture (Judaica)
– Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte (ECHO)
– Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (Google)
– Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (Kalliope)
– University of Bergen (Wittgenstein)
– CNRS ITEM (Nietzsche)
– National Library of Israel (Judaica)
– Berlin Brandenburgische Akademie (German Text Archive)
– Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Polytechnisches Journal)
• Technology Providers
– ExLibris (Aleph, MARC sources management)
– Universität Mannheim / Freie Universität Berlin (LoD2, D2R, SILK)
– Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte (ECHO)
– Net7 S.r.l. (Muruca/Pundit)
– National Technical University of Athens (MINT)

18
• Digital Humanities Community
– Dr. Tobias Blanke (King's College, London)
– Sally Chambers (The European Library / DARIAH-D)
– Prof. Dr. Stefan Gradmann (KU Leuven, Chair)
– Prof. Dr. Gerhard Lauer (Göttingen University)
– Dr. Alois Pichler (UIB)
– Dr. Jürgen Renn (MPIWG)
– Dr. Laurent Romary (HUB)
– Prof. Dr. Susan Schreibman (Trinity College Dublin)
– Dr. Claire Warwick (University College, London)
• Community Building
– Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN)
• Coordination, Management & Information Science
– Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HUB)
• TEL / Europeana Foundation (Europeana Research)

19
• New Associated Partners
– Universitätsbibliothek Frankfurt a.M. (UBFFM)
– Bulgarian Academie of Sciences (BAS)
– Ontotext
– Brandeis University
– Georg Eckert Institute for International Textbook
Research (GEI)
– Joint Distribution Committee (JDC)

20
Europeana (DM2E): What?
• Provide substantial amounts of digital content to Europeana with a
focus on digitised manuscripts (WP1)
• Integrate existing technical building blocks
– from Europeana development
– as well as from generic LoD oriented development
– into a generic production chain for migrating data from various
sources to the EDM as well
– as for the contextualisation of the object representations (WP2).
• Explore usage scenarios of EDM metadata together with object
data in a specialised RDF graph based platform for humanities
research making available specialised visualisation and reasoning
environments (WP3).

21
WP3: Digital Humanities Requirements and
Related Engineering - Context
Goal: lower the barriers for digital content curation by providing
an integrated, flexible, semantic based environment targeted
to digital humanities scholars

22
Expected WP3 Results
• Prototype platform enabling digital scholarship in combining EDM
RDF metadata, digital surrogates and Linked Data ...
• … building on an ontological representation of scholarly work
based on a common understanding of its constituents
• ... resulting in a increasingly complex social semantic scholarly
graph containing RDF statements such as
– VersionA – isSuccessorOf – VersionB
– Statement1 – contradicts - Statement2
– ScribeY – copiedFrom – ScribeZ
• … and which could feed back richly contextualised
EDM to Europeana!

23
Beyond Infrastructure:
The Scholarly Domain Model

24
Cyberinfrastructure:
Atkins Report (2003)
• “Mother of all infrastructure layer cakes” impacted
– “Our Cultural Commonwealth”, e-Science (UK), TextGrid, DARIAH
– With Isidore, Europeana and others being more content oriented and LoD
based

25
Why Beyond Infrastructure?
• We want to move beyond emulation mode …
• … beyond 'pages' and 'links'
• “Research infrastructure is not research just as
roads are not economic activity. We tend to forget
when confronted by large infrastructure projects
that they are not an end in themselves. [...]
Infrastructure projects can become ends in
themselves by developing into an industry that
promotes continued investment. To sustain
infrastructure there develops a class of people
whose jobs are tied to infrastructure investment.”
Rockwell (2010)

26
Scholarly Primitives
and Dynamics
• Unsworth (2000)
– discovering, annotating, comparing, referring, sampling,
illustrating, representing
– as the basis for tool-building enterprises for the Digital
Humanities
• Palmer et al. (2009)(“scholarly information activities”)
– searching, collecting, reading, writing, collaborating
• … Blanke & Hedges (2011), Bamboo (2010), McCarty et.
al. (2002) Anderson et al. (2010) ...
• Bernardou et al. (2010)
– CRM activity and event based process model connecting
research activities with information objects and propositions,
i.e. including argumentation structures

27
The Glue: RDF / RDFS
• Typed statements on web resources (triples) and how
they relate to each other, e. g.
• + RDF Schema (RDFS) language with constructors for
sub- and superclasses and -properties including the
concept of inheritance
• → simple, deterministic logical operations on triple
aggregations (“reasoning”)

28
The Scholarly Domain ...
… from 10.000 feet above

29
Input Area Details

30
+ Output

31
+ Metadata

32
+ Social Context

33
Zoom on Research

34
A normative Model

35
A Car Model

A Model Car

37
A Model Airplane (an Airplane Model?)

38
A 'Structural' Model

39
A Process Model

40
A World Model

41
Model and Representation / Picturing

42
Model and Reduction / Abstraction
Viertelfahr-
zeugmodell

43
Kepler:
the World for Kids
Pragmatic Orientation of Models (1)

44
Einstein's Field Theory:
The World for Physicists

45
The World as Conceptual Graph

46
A Construction Model

47
The V-Model (1)

48
Many V-Models (2)

49
The Generic V-Model (3)

50
An Interaction Model
A Circle, two Triangles

51
Model vs. Metaphor: Atoms as modeled by Bohr
– and the Universe as modeled by Copernicus

52
A mythical World Model

53
Between Myth and Representation

54
From Myth to Metaphor

55
6 Statements on Models. 1 Question
• Models do not represent “reality”, but rather a perspective of
'world'.
• Models are instructions for creating 'reality'.
• Models are selective: they operate on reduction and abstraction.
• Reduction and abstraction always are intentionally guided.
• 'Powerful' models often operate with substantial metaphoric,
connotative and/or symbolic 'surplus'.
• In this perspective, works of art are eminently powerful models!
• Which are our intentions when modeling the scholarly domain?

56
The Wittenstein Incubator

57
Roadmap
a) Identify the intended functional
extension of the 1st Pundit & Korbo
versions (→ visualisation!)
b) Stabilise scholarly domain model
c) Identify additional specialisations of
primitives
d) Formalise, ontologically model such
specialisations
e) Populate the platform with Wittgenstein's
Brown Book and related material
f) Have ~10 scholars work in that

58
Wittgenstein Source
16.04.2013

59
Pundit
16.04.2013

Contextualising Wittgenstein

61
Visualising: Graph of Thinkers

62
Visualising: Graph of Philosophers

63
Nonlinear Reading
http://textexture.com/index.php

64
Expected Results
• A Social Semantic Scholarly Graph
– Enabling interaction (via Pundit and Edgemaps/LODLive)
– Enabling heuristic operations (building on RDFS inference)
– As an object of scholarly study (graph evolution modeling
requires named graph based extensions for versioning,
provenance, authorisation et.)
• Ontology components for modeling scholarly
discourse and interaction
– Beware: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my
world.” Tractatus, 5.6
• And, most importantly: “Whereof one cannot speak,
thereof one must be silent.” Tractatus, 7

65
Bibliography (1)
• Anderson, Sheila; Blanke, Tobias; Dunn, Stuart (2010): Methodological commons:
arts and humanities e-Science fundamentals. In: Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 368 (1925), S.
3779–3796.
• Atkins, Daniel. E., et al. (2003) Revolutionizing Science and Engineering Through
Cyberinfrastructure. Report of the National Science Foundation Blue-Ribbon
Advisory Panel on Cyberinfrastructure.
= http://www.nsf.gov/od/oci/reports/atkins.pdf
• Bamboo (2010): Project Bamboo Scholarly Practice Report.
= http://www.projectbamboo.org/wp-content/uploads/Project-Bamboo-Scholarly-Practices-
Report.pdf
• Benardou, Agiatis; Constantopoulos, Panos; Dallas, Costis; Gavrilis, Dimitris
(2010): A Conceptual Model for Scholarly Research Activity. IConference 2010. =
https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/14945
• Blanke, T., & Hedges, M. (2011). Scholarly primitives: Building institutional
infrastructure for humanities e-Science. Future Generation Computer Systems.
doi:10.1016/j.future.2011.06.006

66
Bibliography (2)
• Borgman, C. L. (2007). Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure
and the Internet. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
• Brockman, William S.; Neumann, Laura; Palmer, Carole L.; Tidline, Tonyia J. (2001):
Scholarly Work in the Humanities and the Evolving Information Environment.
Washington, D.C.: Council on Library and Information Resources.
• Bush, Vannever. ‘As We May Think’. Atlantic Magazine (July 1945). =
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/.
• Dörk, Marian; Carpendale, Sheelagh; Williamson, Carey (2011): Visualizing explicit
and implicit relations of complex information spaces. Information Visualization
2012 11: 5. DOI: 10.1177/1473871611425872
• Doerr, M., Kritsotaki, A., & Boutsika, K. (2011). Factual argumentation—a core
model for assertions making. Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage, 3(3), 1–
34. doi:10.1145/1921614.1921615
• Gradmann, S. (2010). Knowledge = Information in Context : on the Importance of
Semantic Contextualisation in Europeana.
= http://www.scribd.com/doc/32110457/Europeana-White-Paper-1

67
Bibliography (3)
• Gradmann, S., & Meister, J. C. (2008). Digital document and interpretation: re-
thinking “text” and scholarship in electronic settings. Poiesis Praxis, 5(2), 139–153.
doi:10.1007/s10202-007-0042-y
• Johannessen, Harald (2011): Debatt og argumentasjon: En innføring. Oslo:
Spartacus and Scandinavian Academic Press
• McCarty, Willard; Short, Harold (2002): Mapping the Field. Report of ALLC
meeting held in Pisa, April 2002. = http://www.allc.org/node/188
• Palmer, C. L. (2000). Configuring Digital Research Collections around Scholarly
Work. Paper presented at Digital Library Federation Forum, November 19,
Chicago, Illinois.
• Palmer, C., Teffeau, L., & Pirmann, C. (2009). Scholarly Information Practices in the
Online Environment: Themes from the Literature and Implications for Library
Service Development. Report. Development.
= http://www.oclc.org/resources/research/publications/library/2009/2009-02.pdf
• Rockwell, G. (2010, May 14). As Transparent as Infrastructure: On the research of
cyberinfrastructure in the humanities.
= http://cnx.org/content/m34315/1.2/

68
Bibliography (4)
• schraefel, m. c. (2007). What is an Analogue for the Semantic Web and Why is
Having One Important? Manchester: ACM Hypertext 2007.
= http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/264274/1/schraefelSWAnalogueHT07pre.pdf
• Unsworth, J. (2000). Scholarly Primitives: what methods do humanities
researchers have in common, and how might our tools reflect this? Symposium on
Humanities Computing formal methods experimental practice. =
http://www3.isrl.illinois.edu/~unsworth/Kings.5-00/primitives.html
• Unsworth, J., et al. (2006).Our Cultural Commonwealth. Report of the American
Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the
Humanities and Social Sciences.
= http://www.acls.org/cyberinfrastructure/cyber.htm
• Unsworth, John; Tupman, Charlotte (2011): Interview with John Unsworth, April
2011, carried out and transcribed by Charlotte Tupman. In: Marilyn Deegan und
Willard McCarty (Hg.): Collaborative research in the digital humanities. Farnham:
Ashgate, S. 231–239.
Thank you for your patience and attention

69
The Slides I did not Prepare
• Digital? Humanities??
• As opposed to what?
• Which purpose do we need this term for?
• … (→ Discussion)
Thank you for your patience and attention

20130711 linked datascholarship_madrid

More Related Content

What's hot

Viewers also liked

Similar to 20130711 linked datascholarship_madrid

More from Stefan Gradmann

Recently uploaded

20130711 linked datascholarship_madrid