What is linked historical data?

Abstract

Datasets that represent historical sources are relative newcomers in the Linked Open Data (LOD) cloud. Following the standard LOD practices for publishing historical sources raises several questions: how can we distinguish between RDF graphs of primary and secondary sources? Should we treat archived and online RDF graphs differently in historical research? How do we deal with change and immutability of a triplified History? To answer these fundamental questions, we model historical primary and secondary sources using the OntoClean metaproperties and the theories of perdurance and endurance. We then use this model to give a definition of Linked Historical Data. We advocate a set of publishing practices for Linked Historical Data that preserve the ontological properties of historical sources.