Vision

LINKING REFERENCE WORKS OF THE JEWISH CULTURE AND HISTORY

Scholarly reference works like encyclopediae, glossars, or catalogs function as guides to a scholarly domain and as anchor points and manifestations of scholarly work. On the web of Linked Data, they can take on a key function to interlink resources related to the described concepts.

JudaicaLink provides support to publish and interlink existing reference works of the Jewish culture and history as Linked Data.

For each entity described in such works, a Unique Resource Identifier (URI) is created that can be used to link and thereby identify mentions of this entity in metadata and texts. The process of this identification and linking is refered to as contextualisation.

JudaicaLink is developed as part of the DFG-funded project FID Jewish Studies, where a specialized information service is provided for the Jewish Studies. The project is led by the University Library Johann Christian Senckenberg in Frankfurt am Main, together with Mannheim Technical University and the State and University Library Hamburg.

History

JudaicaLink began in the DM2E project (Digitised Manuscripts to Europeana). Since 2016 it has continued as part of the DFG-funded FID Jewish Studies, developed as a knowledge graph in support of research applications in the FID.

The first reference works to be connected were the YIVO Encyclopedia, followed by RUJEN (Russian Jewry Encyclopedia) and then the dataset on the history of the Jews in Hamburg. DBpedia was the first large-scale data source we linked against, which made it possible to connect the individual datasets to each other, including across language boundaries, rather than just to an external reference point.

Over the course of the FID funding phases, the catalogue grew step by step to its current scope. Two milestones stand out. The connection to the GND, and the extraction of records relevant to Jewish Studies from it, put JudaicaLink in a position to supply EntityFacts, which is what lets library systems link out to JudaicaLink directly. And the Entity Pages brought together information about a single entity from across the different source datasets into one consolidated view, giving users a simple way to see everything JudaicaLink knows about it in one place.

Team

These are the people who currently develop JudaicaLink or who did this in the past. Feel free to get in contact if you are interested in the technology, have new ideas for applications of the knowledge graph or want to contribute to knowledge graph research.

JudaicaLink in Mannheim

Founder

Former members