Semantic Web

The Semantic Web plays an important role in the study of the collections of the MWW Research Association. The Semantic Web consists of a portfolio of various technologies and standards which formulate information in an elementary triple-tier structure (subject, predicate, object) and model the data in a human- and machine-readable form (e.g. using the Resource Description Framework (RDF)). These offer new possibilities for other types of presentation and subsequent processes of analysis. For example, individual data collections merge into modelled relations and create a network, with which collection relationships and provenance data can be visualised.

Incorporating authority data management functions opens innovative research possibilities via the SPARQL search query language (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language). These search possibilities allow us to construct object and collection correlations which are not explicitly modelled in the data. The added value of semanticised collections promises to benefit several MWW → case studies, not least of all thanks to better connectivity to external knowledge resources.