Building Linked Open Date Entities for Historical Research

Abstract

Time is a focal point for historical research. Although existing Linked Open Data (LOD) resources hold time entities, they are often limited to modern period and year-month precision at most. Therefore, researchers are currently unable to execute co-reference resolution through entity linking to integrate different datasets which contain information on the day level or remote past. This paper aims to build an RDF model and lookup service for historical time at the lowest granularity level of a single day at a specific point in time, for the duration of 6000 years. The project, Linked Open Date Entities (LODE), generates stable URIs for over 2.2 million entities, which include essential information and links to other LOD resources. The value of date entities is discussed in a couple of use cases with existing datasets. LODE facilitates improved access and connectivity to unlock the potential for the data integration in interdisciplinary research.