Representing COVID-19 information in collaborative knowledge graphs: a study of Wikidata | Zenodo

Abstract:  Information related to the COVID-19 pandemic ranges from biological to bibliographic and from geographical to genetic. Wikidata is a vast interdisciplinary, multilingual, open collaborative knowledge base of more than 88 million entities connected by well over a billion relationships and is consequently a web-scale platform for broader computer-supported cooperative work and linked open data. Here, we introduce four aspects of Wikidata that make it an ideal knowledge base for information on the COVID-19 pandemic: its flexible data model, its multilingual features, its alignment to multiple external databases, and its multidisciplinary organization. The structure of the raw data is highly complex, so converting it to meaningful insight requires extraction and visualization, the global crowdsourcing of which adds both additional challenges and opportunities. The created knowledge graph for COVID-19 in Wikidata can be visualized, explored and analyzed in near real time by specialists, automated tools and the public, for decision support as well as educational and scholarly research purposes via SPARQL, a semantic query language used to retrieve and process information from databases saved in Resource Description Framework (RDF) format.

 

DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly: A Prosopography as Linked Open Data: Some Implications from DPRR

Abstract:  The Digital Prosopography of the Roman Republic (DPRR) project has created a freely available structured prosopography of people from the Roman Republic. As a part of this work the materials that were produced by the project have been made available as Linked Open Data (LOD): translated into RDF, and served through an RDF Server. This article explains what it means to present the material as Linked Open Data by means of working, interactive examples. DPRR didn’t do some of the work which has been conventionally associated with Linked Open Data. However, by considering the two conceptions of the Semantic Web and Linked Open Data as proposed by Tim Berners-Lee one can see how DPRR’s RDF Server fits best into the LOD picture, including how it might serve to facilitate new ways to explore its material. The article gives several examples of ways of exploiting DPRR’s RDF dataset, and other similarly structured materials, to enable new research approaches.

 

Evaluating open access journals using Semantic Web technologies and scorecardsJournal of Information Science – Maria Hallo, Sergio Luján-Mora, Alejandro Maté, 2017

“This paper describes a process to develop and publish a scorecard from an OAJ (Open Access Journal) on the Semantic Web using Linked Data technologies in such a way that it can be linked to related datasets. Furthermore, methodological guidelines are presented with activities related to each step of the process. The proposed process was applied to a university OAJ, including the definition of the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) linked to the institutional strategies, the extraction, cleaning and loading of data from the data sources into a data mart, the transformation of data into RDF (Resource Description Framework), and the publication of data by means of a SPARQL endpoint using the Virtuoso software. Additionally, the RDF data cube vocabulary has been used to publish the multidimensional data on the Web. The visualization was made using CubeViz, a faceted browser to present the KPIs in interactive charts.”