Workshop on Human History Project #1: Digital Prosopography and Linked Open Data

This workshop is organized by CIRMMT Research Axis 3 (Musical information retrieval, archiving and analysis). It will take place on June 21st, in A832 (New Music Building). This workshop is free and open to all. Registration is required.

Registration

Registration is mandatory as seating is limited (35 seats): Workshop on Human History Project #1- registration

Description

This is the inaugural workshop for initiating a large project called Human History Project, which aims to build a distributed international database of documented human history. Our keynote speaker will be Yves Raimond, who is a pioneer in the Linked Open Data research, especially in the field of music. We will also have presentations by researchers at McGill University who have been working on how to extract, using Natural Language Processing tools and model historical data. We hope to have brainstorming discussions following the presentations.

Guests / Speakers

  • Yves Raimond, BBC, UK
  • Ichiro Fujinaga, CIRMMT, Schulich School of Music, McGill University
  • Michel Gagnon, École Polytechnique de Montréal
  • Yu Hua, Computing Science, McGill University
  • Matt Milner, McGill Digital Humanities, McGill University
  • Jin Xing, Computing Science, McGill University

Keynote presentation by Yves Raimond

Linked Data, archives and the BBC

Abstract:

The BBC generates a vast quantity of information, broadcasting between 1,000 and 1,500 programmes per day and generating a significant news output. The BBC has also accumulated a very large archive of TV and radio programmes, as well as pictures, texts, musical scores etc. since 1922. Managing all this information constitutes a major challenge.

In this talk, after giving a brief introduction to Linked Data and associated technologies, we are going to describe some recent work undertaken by BBC R&D to investigate how a mixture of these technologies, machine-generated annotations and crowd-sourcing can enable us to publish large archives of content very quickly.

About Yves Raimond:

Yves Raimond holds a PhD from Queen Mary, University of London. His thesis was entitled ‘A Distributed Music Information System’, and defined a framework for applying a range of Semantic Web technologies for managing and distributing music-related information. As part of his thesis, he contributed extensively to what would become the ‘Linking Open Data’ community project. Since 2008, he has been working for the BBC, first on the bbc.co.uk/programmes service, publishing structured data about all BBC programmes, and then in BBC R&D on the ABC-IP Technology Strategy Board collaborative project, aiming at unlocking archives by interlinking them with related datasets. As part of this project he has worked on a prototype combining automated interlinking with Linked Data sources and crowdsourcing to open up the BBC World Service archive.

Schedule

10:00-10:15 - Ichiro Fujinaga: Introduction to the Human History Project

10:15-11:15 - Yves Raimond-Keynote: Linked Data, archives and the BBC

11:15-11:35 - Matt Milner: RDF and Linked Open Data dissemination for large collaborative humanities research projects using Making Publics: A prototype case study

11:35-12:00 - Ichiro Fujinaga: Introduction to the Digital Prosopography of Renaissance Musicians Project

12:00-12:20 - Yu Hua and Jin Xing: Current state of the Digital Prosopography of Renaissance Musicians Project

12:20-12:40 - Michel Gagon: Relationship Extraction

12:40-13:00 - Discussions

13:00-14:00 - Lunch