Building Social Interactions as a Creation of Networks in an RDF Repository

Abstract

Humanities scholars are not likely to be thinking about their research findings as data, and the predominant models of organizing documents remain generally archival or bibliographic in nature for text-based documents. Although the linked data movement has greatly influenced information organization and search queries on the Web, in comparison to other fields, the adoption of the linked data approach to humanities collections is unequally paced.  This study intends to explain how people or actors make social interactions, and how social interactions are formed in a type of network through the example of the Making Publics (MaPs) project. The objective of the MaPs project is to build collaborative common environments for tracing social interactions between people, things, places and times. To build social interactions, the Networked Event Model was designed in a collaborative environment. Events were defined as six types of nodes (e.g., people, organizations, places, things, events, and literals) in the RDF (Resource Description Framework) triple statements. The interaction vocabulary list is made of 173 verbs and predicates, offering 510 traceable events. The RDF repository runs on a Sesame server and MySQL architecture. Users can use digital tools to select and document events and visually present the selected events in interactive social web forms. The MaPs project sought to extract the network extant in the works of prose in large collaborative humanities documents. In this way, the dissemination of and access to humanities data can be made more connectable, available and accessible to both academic and non-academic communities.