Semantic Blumenbach: Exploration of text-object relationships with semantic web technology in the history of science

Abstract

There are many ways to model relationships between texts and objects. Creating statements with RDF triples is one of them. In the project 'Semantic Blumenbach', we have endeavoured to discover and render visible the innate connections of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach's (1752-1840) writings on natural history with the physical objects studied and collected by him. After a careful evaluation of existing frameworks for describing objects and texts, we decided to test the Scientific Communication Infrastructure (WissKI) for this purpose. During the project, new modules have been developed, and a workflow to connect extracted knowledge from Blumenbach's texts with metadata of objects has been established. The data modelling, the ingest workflow, and project evaluation in the context of the on-going discussion about Linking TEI and CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model are subjects of this article.