RDF

It is difficult to foster innovation and perform high quality research when the underlying data is not accessible and usable. Data and data services should be offered via so-called research data infrastructures, think of user-friendly web platforms, repositories, and databases. But how does it work in practice, and how important is the human aspect of it? I have been at the 1st Conference on Research Data Infrastructure, 12 – 14 September 2023, and got some pretty good insights. In this blog post I will reflect on the conference and cover the keynotes, the poster sessions, our own work around Knowledge Graphs and Wikibase, as well as a selection of other interesting talks.

With the Resource Description Framework (RDF) you can represent Linked Data as subject-predicate-object triples. But what if you have to represent additional context of those triples? In this Blog post I will briefly introduce the advanced data management feature “named graphs” with two examples: different data source named graphs in the BELTRANS project and different story-contexts for Digital Humanities research. Furthermore I will graphically illustrate the different ways you can query named graphs with SPARQL!

In June 2023 I attended a workshop in Hasselt, Belgium, organized by a research network on Knowledge Graphs and Data Integration. Linked Data-based systems and declarative SPARQL queries somehow magically do all the work efficiently, but how? For many people, presentations about using Linked Data and SPARQL already seem very technical. But this event went further, it covered the fundamental algorithms that power the Linked Data systems! In this post I try my best to briefly summarize some of the talks and highlight the added value of those fundamental and often behind-the-scenes work.

This year we had the honor to host the 10th anniversary edition of the DHBenelux conference at the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR). In this blog post I will reflect on the different sessions I’ve attended at this year’s multitrack edition of DHBenelux 2023. I will group my notes around the following four recurring topics of the talks that I have seen: (1) data platforms and their usability, (2) how digital methods such as Linked Open Data are used for DH research, the other way around, (3) how DH research studies digital methods and tools, and finally (4) research with (historical) geospatial data in cultural heritage.