Linking historical ship records to a newspaper archive

Abstract

Linking historical datasets and making them available on the Web has increasingly become a subject of research in the field of digital humanities. In this paper, we focus on discovering links between ships from a dataset of Dutch maritime events and a historical archive of newspaper articles. We apply a heuristic-based method for finding and filtering links between ship instances; subsequently, we use machine learning for article classification to be used for enhanced filtering in combination with domain features. We evaluate the resulting links, using manually annotated samples as gold standard. The resulting links are made available as Linked Open Data, thus enriching the original data.