Creating a Knowledge Graph for Ireland’s Lost History: Knowledge Engineering and Curation in the Beyond 2022 Project

Abstract

The Beyond 2022 project aims to create a virtual archive by digitally reconstructing and digitizing historical records lost in a catastrophic fire which consumed items in the Public Record Office of Ireland in 1922. The project is developing a knowledge graph (KG) to facilitate information retrieval and discovery over the reconstructed items. The project decided to adopt Semantic Web technologies to support its distributed KG and reasoning. In this article, we present our approach to KG generation and management. We elaborate on how we help historians contribute to the KG (via a suite of spreadsheets) and its ontology. We furthermore demonstrate how we use named graphs to store different versions of factoids and their provenance information and how these are serviced in two different endpoints. Modeling data in this manner allows us to acknowledge that history is, to some extent, subjective and different perspectives can exist in parallel. The construction of the KG is driven by competency questions elicited from subject matter experts within the consortium. We avail of CIDOC-CRM as our KG’s foundation, though we needed to extend this ontology with various qualifiers (types) and relations to support the competency questions. We illustrate how one can explore the KG to gain insights and answer questions. We conclude that CIDOC-CRM provides an adequate, albeit complex, foundation for the KG and that named graphs and Linked Data principles are a suitable mechanism to manage sets of factoids and their provenance.