Challenge Entries

The call for submissions to the LODLAM Challenge has closed, and below are the eight entries that we have received. Which LOD project highlights the most innovative ideas, the most interesting data sets, the best visualization?

The final vote for the overall winner (and the $1,500 prize!) will be held at the LODLAM summit (3-4 February).

BiographySampo

https://seco.cs.aalto.fi/projects/biografiasampo/en/

Team Members: Eero Hyvönen, Petri Leskinen, Minna Tamper, Heikki Rantala, Esko Ikkala, Jouni Tuominen, Kirsi Keravuori

Country: Finland

Description: BiographySampo makes a paradigm shift in publishing and using biographies on the Semantic Web, based on LOD, Natural Language Understanding, and Artificial Intelligence. BiographySampo contains a knowledge graph and SPARQL endpoint of 120M triples extracted from 13 100 biographies written by 980 scholars. The texts are enriched with data linking to 16 external data sources and to LOD from libraries, museums, and archives. BiographySampo provides the end-user with ready-to-use tools needed in Digital Humanities research for network analysis, spatio-temporal visualizations, language analysis, and knowledge discovery. The service is in use at http://biografiasampo.fi with tens of thousands users.

Team Photograph: https://seco.cs.aalto.fi/projects/biografiasampo/biographysampo-team.pdf

Center for Integrated Studies of Cultural and Research Resources

Team Members: Makoto Goto, Akihiro Kameda, Sakiko Kawabe, Yuta Hashimoto, Masashi Amano

Country: Japan

Description: Our project, namely ‘Integrated Studies of Cultural and Research Resources (ISCRR)’, at the National Museum of Japanese History in Japan (NMJH) has created an information platform called khirin (Knowledgebase of Historical Resources in Institutes). Khirin contains digital data of historical and cultural resources from both the NMJH and other institutes in Japan in an online portal using LOD and IIIF. Classifying various cultural and research materials by time periods, regions, and research fields, khirin helps analysis of these materials with an interdisciplinary scope which can lead to information backups, more advanced sharing of infrastructure, and additional cooperative studies.

Video: https://www.dropbox.com/s/v58cglolwi5bu10/Video%20of%20khirin_ISCRR_NMJH.mp4

The Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Team Members: Dr. Allison Kupietzky, Esther Esquenazi, Noa Bordan, Talia Misan, Talya Eilon

Country: Israel

Description: The Information Center for Israeli Art, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem (IMJ) contains the largest collection of material about Israeli art – cataloging over 12,000 artists. The Center’s team worked with WIKIDATA to create Linked Open Data to manage this information and harness their data for secondary uses. The team investigated use-cases and artificial intelligence applications including mapping geographic locations, image recognition programs and smart queries using SPARQL endpoints. The LOD mashups leveraged information published on WIKIDATA by other libraries, archives, and museums to enrich the IMJ’s data, enabling the creation of outdoor-art maps, identifying artists in archival photographs and harvesting translations.

Team Photograph: https://photos.app.goo.gl/664LKwQEHrGvkPrc9

American Art Collaborative Linked Open Data Initiative

http://americanartcollaborative.org/

Team Members: A multi-institutional consortium listed at http://americanartcollaborative.org/about/members-of-the-american-art-collaborative/

Country: United States

Description: AAC is an outstanding LOD leadership incentive for museums large and small, with varying technical knowledge and different data systems to work together to create and publish LOD. AAC consists of 14 institutions that published 230,000 object records on the cloud. AAC also published a guide with good practices and FAQ http://americanartcollaborative.org/ . The data is publicly available to all through each participating museums webpage https://discovernewfields.org/research/american-art-collaborative ; through the project’s Github: https://github.com/american-art ; and through a SPARQL Endpoint at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute. AAC is planning a next phase to update data and produce additional tools

Team Justice: http://americanartcollaborative.org/about/

ExpLOD

Team Members: Ben Companjen, Edward Anderson, Jorim Theuns, Matúš Solčány, Philo van Kemenade

Country: Netherlands, Slovakia, UK

Description: Most museums have a few so called “blockbuster” pieces, on show year round, with other high profile works appearing on rotation. The vast majority of works, however, are almost never put on display. We saw this as a challenge of representation. We took it upon ourselves to create a shared experience that would represent the “forgotten” pieces in museum archives. To accomplish this, our team ExpLOD designed a large-scale interactive installation. Able to be used by multiple people at once, this installation will showcase all the works in the archive, as well as related works in other archives, connected through LOD.

Video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1smuHpsAnhIEn_nmX7qYIggE-zptqIHAy/view?usp=sharing

Team Photograph: https://hackalod.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/20191130a255110-768×513.jpg

LD4P Questioning Authority Server Team

Team Members: E. Lynette Rayle, Dave Eichmann, Steven Folsom, Tim Worrall, Huda Khan, John Skinner, Jason Kovari, Simeon Warner

Country: United States

Description: The Questioning Authority Server was developed as part of the LD4P grant series funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. It is designed to ease the path to integrating authoritative data into the cataloging and curation workflows. Using a service architecture, it provides a standard access pattern that is available to any user application (e.g. cataloging, digital collections, discovery). Returning data in the same format for all authorities simplifies required processing in user applications that support multiple authorities. As an open source project, we can determine the requirements together as a community and engage a broad developer support base.

Team Photograph: https://tinyurl.com/uojk674

ScienceStories

Team Members: Kat Thornton, Kenneth Seals-Nutt

Country: United States

Description:

Science Stories is a multimedia storytelling application powered by linked open data. We combine facts from Wikidata, images from Wikimedia Commons and IIIF, and biographies from Wikipedia to tell the stories of scientists from communities historically underrepresented in STEM fields.

We leverage free software and open standards to create multimedia stories which allow people to extend science communication to social spaces on the web. We connect images with descriptive metadata in a web presentation, and combine these images with structured statements in the web of linked data, backed by references to published sources.

Reconstructions and Observations in Archival Resources – Golden Agents

Team Members: Veruska Zamborlini, Leon van Wissen

Country: Netherlands

Description: We present an ontology that enables us to express content and metadata from one of the archival partners of the Golden Agents project in RDF: the Amsterdam Municipal Archives. The model we are building stores information on different levels: (1) a collection level, (2) a content level, (3) a direct and indirect interpretation level, and (4) a reconstruction level. With this, the model facilitates entity disambiguation across different sources, such as baptism or marriage records. In this approach, the chain of provenance is kept, so that researchers can retrace or redo the interpretation and disambiguation process, and can return to the original sources if wanted.