Linked Data for Early MormonismTod Robbins, Dictionary of Mormon Biography

A bit about me

• BA in History from Utah Valley University (2010)

• MLIS from University of Washington’s iSchool (2012)

• Founded Dictionary of Mormon Biography (DMB) in 2012

• Independent researcher/developer

Case Study: Dictionary of Mormon Biography

• Built with MediaWiki, the same software that runs Wikipedia and a host of other wikis

• Original goal: Unique URLs for every documentable member of the Latter Day Saint movement

• Currently: Many pages hyperlinked to authority files (VIAF, LCCN, Wikidata, FamilySearch, MPOT, etc.)

• Next phase: created/expose linked data from every DMB URL for discovery by other platforms

What is Linked Data?

• It is about making links, so that a person or machine can explore the web of data.

• Browsable graphs of relationships between entities

• Resource Description Framework (RDF) Triples

What is Linked Data?

Brigham Young 1 June 1801has birth date

Subject ObjectPredicate

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q203559 1801-06-01

https://schema.org/birthDate

What is Linked Data?

• The four rules:

1. Use URLs as names for things

2. Use HTTP(S) URLs so that people can look up those names

3. When someone looks up a URL, provide useful information, using the standards (RDF*, SPARQL, JSON-LD)

4. Include links to other URLs so that they can discover more things

What is Linked Data?

Mormon Linked Data

1801-06-01schema:birthDate

https://earlysaints.org/eleazerMiller1795

earlysaints:baptizedBy

https://earlysaints.org/brighamYoung1801

1836-03-30

earlysaints:dateOrdainedElder

Mormon Linked Datahttps://earlysaints.org/eleazerMiller1795

earlysaints:baptizedBy

https://earlysaints.org/brighamYoung1801

https://history.lds.org/overlandtravels/pioneers/

2317/eleazer-miller

skos:sameAs