Linked Data for the Historic Environment

This article discusses the outcomes of research undertaken by the Hypermedia Research Group at the University of South Wales in collaboration with the OASIS team at the Archaeology Data Service in the Linked Data for the Historic Environment (LD4HE) project. The new OASIS system allows stakeholders to record information/events accurately and consistently, using established heritage and spatial vocabularies, including those currently available via the Heritage Data platform. The LD4HE project explores one avenue of enhancing the potential re-use of information recorded by OASIS and making connections with other online data collections. LD4HE enables the creation and export of RDF from the new OASIS V system, a major step towards the production of Linked Data. The main outcomes comprise a conceptual mapping between mandatory OASIS fields and the standard CIDOC-CRM ontology, together with a template-based tool to convert records exported from OASIS to a corresponding RDF representation. A set of SPARQL queries demonstrates the outcomes of the data conversion. New specialised vocabularies required by OASIS have been published as linked data on the Heritage Data platform. The methods are described and illustrated with examples. Reflections on the case study and cost/benefit considerations for Linked Data conversion are discussed, together with possible strategies for reducing the costs of producing Linked Data.