will's world: walking through shakespeare
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DESCRIPTION
A presentation by Muriel Mewissen, Project Manager of the Shakespeare Registry Project. Delivered at the Cataloguing and Indexing Group Scotland (CIGS) Linked Open Data (LOD) Conference which took place Fri 21 September 2012 at the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation.TRANSCRIPT
http://willsworld.blogs.edina.ac.uk
Will’s World: Walking Through Shakespeare
The use of Linked Data in the Shakespeare Registry Project
Muriel Mewissen – Project Manager
21 September 2012 1
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Outline
• Shakespeare Registry background• British Museum SPARQL endpoint• Conclusion
21 September 2012
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Background
• JISC Discovery Programme 10 months projects– Dec 11 to Sep 12
• Aim: to improve discoverability and usability of online data through better access to better metadata
• Demonstrate the benefits and principles of assembling metadata: ‘aggregation as a tactic’
• Focus on Shakespeare– Lots of data– Cultural Olympiad & Anniversary 23rd April
• Glasgow culture hack event
21 September 2012
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Shakespeare Registry
• Filters (Themes, Data types, Metadata, APIs, Sources,…)
• Useful tools, license, documentation (build, use, register, contribute…)
API API
Content Providers• Register online sources• Contribute metadata about
resources
Users/Developers• Search, Identify, Locate online
resources using metadata aggregation
Shakespeare Registry
API API
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Linked Data Fit
Wikipedia on Linked Data:
“linked data describes a method of publishing structured data so that it can be interlinked and become more useful. It builds upon standard Web technologies such as HTTP and URIs, but rather than using them to serve web pages for human readers, it extends them to share information in a way that can be read automatically by computers. This enables data from different sources to be connected and queried… using standard formats such as RDF/XML…”
Answer?
21 September 2012
Questions
Users/Developers Who? What?
Registry Self- sustainable, transferable
How? Attractive? Format? Schema? License?
ContentRich, complex
How much? Sharing? Easy Access? Format?
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Linked Data Provision
• Over 40 sources of online resources – Royal Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Shakespeare’s
Globe, Shakespeare Institute, Folger Shakespeare Library, Open Shakespeare, World Shakespeare Festival, Open Source Shakespeare, …
– British Museum, British Library, Bodleain Library, Bristish Universities Film & Video Council, National Library of Scotland, Wellcome Images, British Library of Sounds, JISC MediaHUB, BBC, …
– National Theatre Poster, Bosak’s Play of Shakespeare in XML, The work of the Bard, internet Shakespeare Editions, PlayShakespeare.com, Seanco Technology Shakespeare Quote Generator, ...
• Many images, some XML, one SPARQL endpoint!British Museum: http://collection.britishmuseum.org/Sparql
21 September 2012
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SPARQL Endpoint
• Service endpoint• Web interface • Run SPARQL
queries• Linked Data • Structured RDF
stores
21 September 2012
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Using the British Museum SPARQL
Easy to start: • Sample query: document ontologies• Help: data structure, access & URIS• Documentation: Controlled terms, object names thesaurus
Search for “Shakespeare”, “William Shakespeare” • Difficult to do keyword search • Difficult to do multi-stage search
– Find the unique ID for an entity – Retrieve information related to the entity
• Limited or no results• Overload the service
21 September 2012
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SPARQL Common Issues
Common issues:• Lack of documentation (ontologies, identifiers)• Lack example queries• Lack of identifiers • Slow, timeouts & result size limit• Inefficient queries (text & keyword search)
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SPARQL endpoint
SPARQL is not• Relational DB (search on given value for field)– Simple SQL query can be complex
• Text DB like Solr (flexible text search)– Not suited for discovery
SPARQL provides links & context Think about Linked Data in the right way
21 September 2012
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Asking the Right Questions
• Structured data needs structured queries• To build meaningful queries, we need to know:– Data, structure, schema, identifiers
• Internally specified
How do we identify “William Shakespeare” and related objects before we can the retrieve the relevant Linked Data?• Need identifier for “William Shakespeare”• URI or ID in the British Museum schema21 September 2012
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Workflow for extracting metadata
1. Collection Database Search GUI
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Collection Database Search
2. Select object
4209 Results!
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3. Extract the ID for the object
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4. Use the ID in the SPARQL query
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5. Extract the metadata
Repeat for the remaining 4208 objects!
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Sustainable Workflow?
Workaround• Multiple GUI searches on Shakespeare,
William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Hamlet,….• Manual steps• Many small queries, few large queries
Feedback on blog postPerson ID for “Shakespeare, William”
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Internal ID
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400 triples
21 September 2012
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Conclusions
• SPARQL best suited to link data from different informational silos, not suited to text search and discovery
• Common identifiers are essentials (i.e. ISSN)– Use of standards (ISNI), common language & ontologies
• Documentation & example queries• Be prepared – To use additional data sources to identify URIs – To run many queries
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Thanks
• British Museum– SPARQL is Beta version to generate feedback– New version available within a few months
• Owen Stephens• EDINA
Peter Burnhill, Jackie Clark, Catherine Fleming, Andrew Dorward, Neil Mayo, Nicola Osborne, Christine Rees, Tim Stickland
21 September 2012