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
Mormon Linked Data
1801-06-01schema:birthDate
https://earlysaints.org/eleazerMiller1795
earlysaints:baptizedBy
https://earlysaints.org/brighamYoung1801
1836-03-30
earlysaints:dateOrdainedElder