Keeping Track of History with Semantic Technology

January 26, 2016 / Melody Smith / Comments Off on Keeping Track of History with Semantic Technology

Historians used to keep important information in their heads and then progressed to note cards and pieces of paper. Eventually official entries in record books became the norm, that is until digital indexing was created. Even then many of the traditionalists believed it was a fad or short-lived phenomenon. DATAVERSITY brought this information to us in their article, “How Historians and Detectives Can Benefit from a Semantic Graph Database.”

With the emergence of digital humanities as a separate field of research, things started changing. Out of that new developments took place and one of those is a piece of open source software, Segrada, that allows historians to keep track of their data.

This is different from wikis or archival databases as it focuses on information and interrelations within it. Pieces of information might represent persons, places, things, or concepts. These ‘nodes’ can be bidirectionally connected with each other to semantically represent friendship, blood relation, whereabouts, authorship, and so on. Hence the term ‘semantic graph database,’ since information can be displayed as a graph of semantically connected nodes.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.

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Melody Smith

Melody K. Smith has provided organizational, social media and digital communication services to a large non-profit for the past twenty years. Prior to that she championed employee engagement and communications in the healthcare field. She holds a Bachelors degree in Marketing. When not wrangling and writing TaxoDiary content for your reading pleasure, Melody writes fiction, rescues dogs and throws legendary dinner parties.