Many Projects One Platform: Renegotiating Semantics Across Knowledge Graphs

Presenters: Jessika Davis, Research Fellow, Pratt Institute Semantic Lab Karen Li-Lun Hwang (she/her), Metadata Librarian / Archivist, Semantic Lab / Asian American Arts Centre M. Cristina Pattuelli, Professor, Pratt Institute School of Information Matt Miller, Linked Data Specialist, Library of Congress Ava Kaplan, Research and Instruction Librarian, Teachers College Columbia University The Semantic Lab at Pratt has a long and ongoing engagement with cultural heritage linked open data, beginning with the Linked Jazz project in 2011. This session will cover Semantic Lab’s evolving approach to generating linked open data from archival documents and how the adoption of Wikibase and the development of a custom-built annotation platform have significantly enhanced our capabilities. They allow the capture of more knowledge and the management of diverse projects simultaneously, expanding a simple set of social network triples into complex knowledge graphs. These affordances, however, expose a need for new, more intentional lines of cross-project collaborative work, as ontological inconsistencies between projects are revealed. In this session, we will provide examples of how Wikibase’s built-in functionality facilitates our efforts to renegotiate semantics and restructure classes in order to unify a range of digital humanities projects like E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) and the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, as well remediate incongruences resulting from the migration of legacy data into a more complex model. We will also discuss how a broader community of researchers, data practitioners, and cultural institutions impacts our work through their interest in, contribution to, and use of our data. Presented on 11 October 2024 at the 2024 LD4 Conference on Linked Data