=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3724/paper2
|storemode=property
|title=Exploring Prosopographical Information in the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland’s Knowledge Graph for Irish History
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3724/paper2.pdf
|volume=Vol-3724
|authors=Beyza Yaman,Lucy McKenna,Alex Randles,Lynn Kilgallon,Peter Crooks,Declan O’Sullivan
}}
==Exploring Prosopographical Information in the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland’s Knowledge Graph for Irish History==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3724/paper2.pdf
Digital Prosopographical Information in the Virtual
Record Treasury of Ireland’s Knowledge Graph for
Irish History
Beyza Yaman1,∗ , Lucy McKenna1 , Alex Randles1 , Lynn Kilgallon2 , Peter Crooks2 and
Declan O’Sullivan1
1
ADAPT Centre, SCSS, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
2
Department of History, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
Abstract
The Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland (VRTI), a virtual archive currently in the third phase of its
research programme (2023-2025), places a key emphasis on utilising Semantic Web technologies to
further construct a comprehensive knowledge graph (KG) of historical Irish biographical data. To do
this, computer scientists and historians are collaborating closely to enhance the VRTI Knowledge Graph
for Irish History (VRTI-KG) in a multidisciplinary manner. Biographical data was uplifted to RDF format
as a result of the collaboration, and the prosopographical graph currently includes 965 women and
8807 notable men from Irish history. Apart from employing the out-of-the-box tools, a new tailored
VRTI-KG Editor has been introduced to facilitate the exploration of the VRTI-KG. This paper describes
the VRTI-KG’s technical architecture and provides an overview of the tools being used to interact with
and explore VRTI-KG, as illustrated by a use case using a notable people whose graph is displayed.
Keywords
Linked Data, Visualization Tools, Prosopography, Digital Humanities
1. Introduction
The Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland (VRTI)1 [1, 2, 3] is an all-island and international legacy
from Ireland’s Decade of Centenaries. The VRTI digital resource is the outcome of the Beyond
2022 project – a seven-year programme of State-funded research hosted at Trinity College
Dublin, which combines historical investigation, archival conservation and technical innovation
to re-imagine and reconstruct Ireland’s national treasury of records lost in a catastrophic fire in
1922 [3]. The Irish Civil War commenced on June 28th, 1922, when the Four Courts in Dublin,
which had been occupied by military forces opposed to the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, was
attacked by the National Army of the Provisional Government of the Irish Free State. On the
third day of the bombardment of the Four Courts, a massive explosion caused significant damage
SemDH’24: First International Workshop of Semantic Digital Humanities, May 28, 2024, Creete, Greece
∗
Corresponding author.
Envelope-Open beyza.yaman@adaptcentre.ie (B. Yaman); lucy.mckenna@adaptcentre.ie (L. McKenna);
alex.randles@adaptcentre.ie (A. Randles); kilgalll@tcd.ie (L. Kilgallon); pcrooks@tcd.ie (P. Crooks);
declan.osullivan@adaptcentre.ie (D. O’Sullivan)
Orcid 0000-0003-2130-0312 (B. Yaman); 0000-0002-6035-7656 (L. McKenna); 0000-0001-6231-3801 (A. Randles);
0000-0002-3075-8571 (L. Kilgallon); 0000-0001-6782-044X (P. Crooks); 0000-0003-1090-3548 (D. O’Sullivan)
© 2024 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
1
Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland at https://virtualtreasury.ie/
CEUR
ceur-ws.org
Workshop ISSN 1613-0073
Proceedings
to the buildings in the western part of the Four Courts complex [3]. The fire spread to nearby
buildings, including the Public Record Office of Ireland (PROI), which held over seven centuries
of Ireland’s documentary heritage in a purpose-built archival repository known as the “Record
Treasury”. A century later, in June 2022, the VRTI was launched. The Beyond 2022 project
decided to use Semantic Web technologies to support the powerful knowledge distribution and
reasoning and has made available the VRTI Knowledge Graph (VRTI-KG) of Irish History.2 . An
initial presentation of the development process used to produce the VRTI-KG was published in
2022 [14]. The VRTI-KG contains knowledge of notable People, Places, Offices, Organisations,
and Interests and their interconnections, from the records of Irish history. This new phase of
research (2023-2025)3 contains six research strands, five of which are enhancing the materials
available through the VRTI and the sixth focusing on further enhancing the VRTI-KG itself and
the development of better and more appropriate user interfaces to the KG.
The VRTI takes a multidisciplinary approach to KG management through the collaboration
of computer scientists and historians in requirements gathering, interface design and project
planning. Semantic Web technologies have been employed to address the project’s requirements
which include: i) using a structured data format for the purpose of interconnecting related
entities based on time periods and entity types; ii) offering data lineage so that the origins
of data may be tracked; iii) presenting data in an engaging manner to the general public; iv)
offering historians a user interface for finding, updating, editing and publishing KG data.
In the scope of the first phase of the VRTI’s research programme, an ontology extending
CIDOC-CRM [4] was developed and published online as the B2022 ontology4 . The KG is
modelled on this ontology and a Named Graph infrastructure is also used to contextualise
entities depending on the class types (e.g. place, person etc.). Data lineage is provided by
adopting the PROV-O ontology to express when the KG was updated and by whom. Interaction
with the VRTI-KG is currently enabled through the use of existing out-of-the-box Knowledge
Graph tools including OSCAR [5, 6], Ontodia [7], LodView5 and Beyond Timelines6 which can
be accessed through VRTI website7 . However, these out-of-the-box tools have been designed
primarily for use by knowledge engineers, as they have to cover a wide range of deployment
scenarios, from event-based networks [8] through to classical data integration [9] scenarios. The
contributions of this paper include the technical design considerations of the VRTI Knowledge
Graph for Irish History, the implementation of the VRTI-KG Editor - a bespoke user interface
designed for use by the public and historians to interact with the VRTI-KG and the presentation
of how out-of-the-box tooling can be used to demonstrate prosopographical data for people
represented in the KG.
The rest of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 discusses related work focusing on
prosopographical data. Section 3 provides a use-case from the VRTI-KG. Section 4 discusses the
ontology and tools which are used to explore the VRTI-KG. Section 5 presents the technical
2
https://virtualtreasury.ie/knowledge-graph
3
Deep History, Deepening Collaborations, to be found at: https://virtualtreasury.ie/backend/flipbooking/
vrti-101-brochure/
4
https://ont.virtualtreasury.ie/ontology/index-en.html
5
https://lodview.it/
6
https://github.com/Beyond-2022/Beyond-2022.github.io
7
https://virtualtreasury.ie/knowledge-graph
architecture of the project. Finally, Section 6 concludes the paper and discusses future work.
2. Related Work
This paper presents how the VRTI is using out-of-the-box Linked Data tooling to provide users
with the ability to explore biographical data in the VRTI-KG. In addition, work is underway on
a customised VRTI-KG Editor to enhance that user experience. In this section, we first discuss
the rationale for taking both an out-of-the-box approach and adding to it with a customised
approach to support user interaction with the VRTI-KG.
AcademySampo [10, 11] discusses the initial outcomes of converting the Finnish registries
“Ylioppilasmatrikkeli” 1640–1852 and 1853–1899, containing comprehensive biographical in-
formation on academic individuals in Finland, into a Linked Open Data service. This project
adheres to the FAIR principles and uses named entity recognition and linking techniques, with
the intention of creating a Semantic Web portal named “AcademySampo” for biographical and
prosopographical research.
BiographySampo [12, 13] introduces a Semantic Web portal designed to illustrate and explore
the National Biography of Finland (NBF). The foundation of the system is an automatically
derived KG from a set of 13,100 textual NBF biographies, enhanced with information pointing
to sixteen additional data sources obtained through data harvesting from external collections
found in archives, museums, and libraries.
WarSampo Knowledge Graph [14, 15], is a Linked Open Data resource with detailed metadata
on over 100,000 individuals related to Finland in World War II. The WarSampo KG showcases
and facilitates the visualisation and analysis of prosopographical phenomena including the death
records of WW2 casualties from a prosopographical perspective, provided by the various local
military cemeteries where the dead were buried. The problem is solved using aggregated Linked
Open Data provided by the WarSampo Data Service and SPARQL endpoint, and providing tools
for data analysis and supporting digital humanities studies.
People of Medieval Scotland (POMS) project8 [16] encompasses information on individuals
involved in events in or related to Scotland between the death of Malcolm III in 1093 and Robert
I’s parliament in 1314, covering territory established as part of Scotland by the death of Alexander
III (excluding Orkney and Shetland). The data is structured to reflect social interactions and
relationships, providing insights into how these were mediated by the documents themselves
using a general “factoid-oriented” model that links people to the information about them via
references to primary sources that assert that information.
Digital Prosopography of the Roman Republic [17] aims to enhance prosopographical re-
search on the Roman Republic’s elite by creating a searchable KG database with a terminological
approach providing information on careers, office holdings, family relationships and personal
status, thereby facilitating new research possibilities through statistical and quantitative meth-
ods. The triple based “factoid model” of digital prosopography has been applied to major
databases dealing with medieval England, Scotland, France, and Byzantium.
History of Vienna with Semantic MediaWiki project [18] examines the role of Semantic
MediaWiki (SMW) in knowledge graph curation, focusing on the Vienna History Wiki as a case
8
www.poms.ac.uk
study. It discusses collaborative editing processes, linking unique identifiers, and integration
with external sources like Wikidata and Schema.org. The project includes entities such as
people, events, organizations, and places from Vienna.
Within the project scope, in contrast to the works mentioned above, first out-of-the-box
tools were introduced that did not require any data or tool transformation. They were quick to
implement and deploy to the server. Furthermore, a customised tool has been implemented
for VRTI-KG for a number of reasons. Other elements, such as maps and events with unique
underlying structures, should be included in addition to prosopographical data. The decision to
recently start a new user interface development for VRTI-KG was informed by the observations
that; i) the out-of-the-box features, although usable by the historians in their engagement with
the VRTI-KG, still had a very unnatural technical feel for them; ii) more appealing methods of
presenting data are now possible thanks to recent advancements in visualisation technologies.
3. Use Case
The VRTI-KG helps explore the intertwined narratives of individuals and locations in Ireland,
spanning from the medieval to the modern era. Currently, much of the data regarding historical
people comes from the Dictionary of Irish Biography (DIB)9 a project of the Royal Irish Academy,
and the persons listed in Philomena Connolly’s calendar of medieval Irish Exchequer Payments,
1270-1446 [19]. The DIB is an authoritative reference work of nearly 11,000 notable figures in
Irish history, society and culture from the earliest times to the twenty-first century. Biographies
range in length from 200 to 15,000 words, covering diverse figures across a broad range of human
activity from scientists to sportspeople, or from suffragists to soldiers. The individuals drawn
from Connolly’s calendar of Irish Exchequer payments were those who received payments
from the English government in Ireland between 1270-1446. The data sources mentioned above
provide biographical data in text and CSV formats based on a structured database which is highly
curated. Using an unstructured/semistructured data format has the following two drawbacks:
Firstly, despite the sources having a wealth of important information, users may find it difficult
to locate the precise fact or piece of information they are searching for. Secondly, finding the
relationships between the individuals is difficult because the texts do not typically indicate how
they are related to one another. In the scope of this work, only semistructured data sets are
uplifted to RDF format.
The VRTI team has created a person schema that allows for the CSV capture of biographical
data for individuals represented in the sources in order to uplift the data into a rich graph-based
structured data format that makes the information about individuals, and connections between
individuals, more easily navigable by a user and allows for further information to be easily
linked in as new data sources are processed. The current person schema includes concepts such
as forename, surname and their variant spellings, gender, date and place of birth and death,
family relations, religion, occupation, areas of interest and, where possible, interlinks to related
records in the DIB and Wikidata10 . Using the VRTI ontology as a data model, information about
9
https://www.dib.ie/
10
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Introduction
people is uplifted from the data sources into RDF11 , a standard Linked Data format, using the
R2RML12 mapping language. In total, the VRTI-KG contains 8807 men and 965 women from
Irish history uplifted from the DIB and Irish Exchequer Payments 1270-1446.
The poet and playwright Oscar Wilde13 is one of the notable people in the DIB whose
biographical data was uplifted to the VRTI-KG. Listing 1 presents a partial snippet of the
uplifted RDF triples for Oscar Wilde. In the first set of triples, it can be seen that Oscar
Wilde is classified as a cidoc:E21_Person who is listed in (cidoc:P71i_is_listed_in) the DIB
at . Wilde’s areas of
interest (b2022:DIB_area_of_interest) have been declared as “Literature” and “Theatre, Film
and TV”. Properties from the VRTI ontology are represented using the prefix “b2022”. These
properties were added in cases where a suitable property was not available in CIDOC-CRM.
The second set of triples provides information on the birth of Oscar Wilde. This
birth event is given a date (cidoc:P4_has_time-span) and a geographic location
(cidoc:P7_took_place_at). This event is attributed to Oscar Wilde using the inverse prop-
erty (cidoc:P98_brought_into_life). CIDOC-CRM uses time-spans to describe dates as this
allows for the provision of date ranges where there is historical uncertainty. However, as Oscar
Wilde’s birth and death dates are known, these specific dates are used as the range. Geospatial
information can also be provided here by linking a birth or death event with a location. The
VRTI-KG data for Oscar Wilde is available for exploration using a set of Linked Data tools
discussed in Section 4.
@prefix cidoc : < h t t p : / / e r l a n g e n − crm . o r g / c u r r e n t / > .
@prefix xsd : < h t t p : / / www . w3 . o r g / 2 0 0 1 / XMLSchema # > .
@prefix rdfs : < h t t p : / / www . w3 . o r g / 2 0 0 0 / 0 1 / r d f − schema # > .
@prefix b2022 : .
< h t t p s : / / kb . v i r t u a l t r e a s u r y . i e / p e r s o n / W i l d e _ O s c a r − F i n g a l − O F l a h e r t i e − W i l l s _ c 1 9 _ d i b _ a 9 0 3 6
> a cidoc : E21_Person ;
c i d o c : P 7 1 i _ i s _ l i s t e d _ i n < h t t p s : / / www . d i b . i e / b i o g r a p h y / Wilde − O s c a r − F i n g a l − O F l a h e r t i e −
a9036 > ;
b2022 : D I B _ a r e a _ o f _ i n t e r e s t
< h t t p s : / / kb . v i r t u a l t r e a s u r y . i e / d i b − a r e a − o f − i n t e r e s t / I E / T h e a t r e − F i l m −and −TV> ,
< h t t p s : / / kb . v i r t u a l t r e a s u r y . i e / d i b − a r e a − o f − i n t e r e s t / I E / L i t e r a t u r e > .
< h t t p s : / / kb . v i r t u a l t r e a s u r y . i e / b i r t h / W i l d e _ O s c a r − F i n g a l − O F l a h e r t i e − W i l l s _ c 1 9 _ d i b _ a 9 0 3 6 >
a cidoc : E67_Birth ;
c i d o c : P 4 _ h a s _ t i m e − span < h t t p s : / / kb . v i r t u a l t r e a s u r y . i e / t i m e − s p a n / 1 8 5 4 − 1 0 − 1 6 _ 1 8 5 4 − 1 0 − 1 6 > ;
c i d o c : P 7 _ t o o k _ p l a c e _ a t < h t t p s : / / kb . v i r t u a l t r e a s u r y . i e / p l a c e / I E / D u b l i n > ;
c i d o c : P 9 8 _ b r o u g h t _ i n t o _ l i f e < h t t p s : / / kb . v i r t u a l t r e a s u r y . i e / p e r s o n / W i l d e _ O s c a r − F i n g a l −
OFlahertie −Wills_c19_dib_a9036 > .
Listing 1: Partial set of triples pertaining to Oscar Wilde
11
https://www.w3.org/RDF/
12
https://www.w3.org/TR/r2rml/
13
https://www.dib.ie/biography/wilde-oscar-fingal-oflahertie-a9036
4. VRTI Ontology and KG Exploration Tools
This section describes the VRTI Ontology and exploration tools to visualise the prosopographical
information in the VRTI-KG
4.1. VRTI Ontology: Use of Standard Ontologies
The VRTI ontology14 primarily consists of named individuals for qualifying entities in the
CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC-CRM). CIDOC-CRM is a high-level, event-based
ontology of human activity, things and events, which provides a formal structure for describing
concepts and relationships commonly used in the cultural heritage domain [20]. It is recognised
as an international standard (ISO 21127:2014)15 for the controlled exchange of cultural heritage
information. CIDOC-CRM (version 7.1.2) consists of 81 classes and 160 properties. In order to
accurately model Irish historical data, the VRTI ontology introduced bespoke types that are
related to entities via the cidoc:P2_has_type predicate (instead of creating instances with
rdf:type). Examples of these bespoke types, all of which are instances of cidoc:E55_Type,
include b2022:Floruit to represent the period in which a person “flourished” (Latin: floreo, ‘to
bloom, flourish’), b2022:Office, b2022:Occupation, and b2022:Rank for qualifying some of
the professional groups to which a person belonged. Other types describe different kinds of
places such as b2022:Chapel, b2022:Manor, b2022:Harbour and b2022:Friary. Types were
used to ensure maximum backwards compatibility with the CIDOC-CRM model. Twelve object
properties were also created as part of the VRTI Ontology. These properties were added where
there was no existing CIDOC-CRM property available that was suitable to express a given
relationship. For example, the properties b2022:ofHusband and b2022:ofWife were added in
order to link a marriage event to the individuals being married. The ontology has been published
according to best practices in Linked Data and its documentation and behaviour according to
Linked Data principles have been generated with WIDOCO [21].
4.2. Prosopography Exploration in VRTI-KG
As mentioned in Section 2, a prosopography of the Irish poet and playwright Oscar Wilde will
be presented using data from the VRTI-KG via the KG exploration tools employed by the project.
4.2.1. LodView
LodView16 is a web application used to dereference the URIs of RDF resources. When a user
requests the URI of an RDF resource, LodView retrieves the data about the resource from the
SPARQL endpoint and presents this data as a human-readable HTML page. On the HTML page,
the resource properties are represented in rows and columns. In each row, the first column
contains the property name and the second column contains the property value. If a property
value is the URI of another resource, then the value is provided as a clickable link that takes
users to another page describing that resource.
14
https://ont.virtualtreasury.ie/ontology/index-en.html
15
https://www.iso.org/standard/57832.html
16
https://kb.virtualtreasury.ie/lodview/
Fig.2 shows the LodView representation of some of the data pertaining to resource for Oscar
Wilde in the VRTI-KG LodView interface. Here you can see information such as a link to Oscar
Wilde’s WikiData entry, gender, interests and DIB identifier.
Figure 1: LodView generated HTML page for Oscar Wilde.
4.2.2. Oscar
Oscar17 is an OpenCitations RDF Search Application, which can be used to search any RDF
triplestore providing a SPARQL endpoint. Oscar provides a user-friendly search interface in
that it hides the complexities of SPARQL queries from non-Linked Data experts. For VRTI,
Oscar has been configured to search for terms entered by users in a search bar in the rdfs:label
attribute associated with an entity. Fig.1 shows the results of a search for Oscar Wilde in the
VRTI-KG using the Oscar tool. The results include the HTTP URI (unique resource identifier)
for Oscar Wilde’s appellation as well as his entry in the DIB. By clicking on the URI, users are
redirected to the LodView page describing the entity.
17
https://oscar.virtualtreasury.ie/oscar/index.html
Figure 2: OSCAR search results for Oscar Wilde.
4.2.3. Ontodia
Ontodia18 is a visualisation tool that allows users to interactively explore entities in a Knowledge
Graph and dynamically navigate their connections. For the VRTI, a SPARQL query has been
designed that retrieves all resources in the KG and Ontodia presents these results in a node and
edge visualisation. Fig.3 displays how a user could explore information about Oscar Wilde19 in
the VRTI-KG. The nodes in the image represent Oscar Wilde, his name, his date of birth and
his date of death. Users can click on these nodes and discover other attributes and resources
associated with Oscar Wilde in the KG.
Figure 3: Ontodia View of Oscar Wilde.
18
https://ontodia.virtualtreasury.ie/ontodia/
19
https://kb.virtualtreasury.ie/person/Wilde_Oscar-Fingal-OFlahertie-Wills_c19_dib_a9036
4.2.4. BeyondTimelines
Beyond Timelines20 is a bespoke data visualisation tool developed for the VRTI21 . By querying
the VRTI SPARQL endpoint, the Beyond Timelines tool can generate a visualisation of people
born within a specified time-frame as selected by the user.
The resulting image displays all persons in the VRTI-KG born within the selected dates, and
also colour-codes these individuals based on their associated interests. Fig.4 displays the result
of a search for people born between 1854 and 1855. Oscar Wilde’s entry can be seen and is
colour-coded according to the areas of interest of literature and theatre. Using this tool, users
can discover other persons born around the same time as Oscar Wilde and they can get a sense
of the areas of interests of these individuals.
Figure 4: Beyond Timelines view for people born between 1854 and 1855.
4.2.5. VRTI-KG Editor
The VRTI knowledge graph editor has been designed by the VRTI-KG team to allow subject-
matter experts (historians) with limited relevant technical background knowledge to search and
edit entities in the VRTI graph. The web-based editor provides a graphical user interface (GUI)
that transforms form input provided by end users into SPARQL queries, which are executed on
the graph. The editor provides sections to allow editing of entities representing people, places,
offices and organisations. Moreover, it allows to visualize data
As can be seen in Fig.5, several people are retrieved from the execution of the SPARQL query
which was generated by inserting the string “Oscar Wilde” into a filter condition. The retrieved
people are presented in tabular format with columns detailing distinguishable information,
which is hoped to aid in identifying the correct entity to edit. In addition, the table can be
searched by keyword to find the respective entity.
20
https://github.com/Beyond-2022/Beyond-2022.github.io
21
https://timelines.virtualtreasury.ie/timelines/
Figure 5: Search results for people with the name “Oscar Wilde” in the editor.
Fig.6 presents a screenshot of the main editing page for a person in the editor. The editing
page contains several headings at the top, which group editable attributes based on similarities
hoped to improve navigation.
Figure 6: Edit page for a person in the editor.
The inputs presented on the edit page are a combination of free text, dropdown menus and
restricted text. Validation is completed on the input to help prevent inaccurate data from being
inserted into the graph. A status is associated with each entity to provide an indication of the
level of associated information and whether it requires further editing.
Producing high-quality data is essential when inserting triples using the VRTI-KG Editor
since errors in the data source can lead to unreliability [22]. Thus, SHACL Shapes are used to
validate that data graphs meet a set of requirements. To guarantee that the resources produced
are of a high-quality, SHACL shapes have been created for the entities that the graph editor
has produced as part of this work. Graphs which do not satisfy these conditions result in
debugging information being shown to users and the creation will be halted. The SHACL rules
are currently generated manually, however, we are investigating automatic rule generation
methods that leverage the underlying ontology structure to construct SHACL Shapes [23]. A
user evaluation of the VRTI-KG editor with historians is currently underway and it is hoped to
publish the results when available.
5. Technical Architecture
This section discusses the technical architecture and technical decisions made during the project.
5.1. KG Architecture Diagram
In this project, two different virtual machines are being used to provide a secure environment
for the production and deployment of the systems, as well as providing a seamless infrastructure
for public users.
The first virtual machine is called the production server, where web applications using
Tomcat and Apache are provided with access to a write-protected Blazegraph triplestore. Users
can access and visualise the data through several applications, namely, a Blazegraph query
interface22 , LodView, Ontodia, Oscar and Beyond Timelines (see Section 4). Fig.7 presents the
technical diagram of the KG structure in the VRTI project. The applications and triplestore are
started by the developer on the web server. From the VRTI website23 , hyperlinks are provided
to users to the KG exploration tools described in Section 4. Upon system launch, the user can
interact with the visualization tools by visiting the VRTI website.
The second server (Fig 8) is called the development server and this server is used to host
tools that are under development. In order to safeguard and maintain the security of the data
on the production server, a separate server was deployed and access to programmes running
on this server is restricted to the VRTI historians. This server hosts the KG visualisation and
editing interface, called VRTI-KG Editor, which is currently being developed. Users who have
authenticated with the system can access, add and edit data in the development server triplestore
as soon as the developer launches updates to the applications in order to test the tooling.
Furthermore, data can be visualised using tables and maps if it has a geospatial aspect
connected to the biographical information. The user can also export data from the system as
22
https://blazegraph.virtualtreasury.ie/blazegraph/#query
23
https://virtualtreasury.ie/knowledge-graph
Figure 7: Production Server Diagram.
spreadsheets (CSVs) whenever they are needed locally. The data is systematically backed up to
the GitHub repository to avoid data loss.
Figure 8: Development Server Diagram.
5.2. Triplestore Selection
Currently, we are using Blazegraph triplestore for our facilities however due to several reasons
we decided to migrate from Blazegraph to another triplestore: i) Due to the acquisition of the
Blazegraph by Amazon Neptune, Blazegraph is not maintained anymore as an open source tool
ii) Blazegraph does not support GeoSPARQL extension fully and visualisation requirements
of the project need GeoSPARQL queries to be posed to the endpoint and iii) Blazegraph has
been resulting with timeouts for some query types and crashes unexpectedly which causes
instability. Taking into account these issues, we decided to migrate to another triplestore. We
looked at the literature for the comparison of several features24 [24] and decided to migrate to
Virtuoso triplestore. Even though Fuseki25 seems to be compliant to more features, it was too
slow for our queries which required some OPTIONAL script. As such, Virtuoso Open-Source
Edition26 is currently being trialled.
6. Conclusions and Future Work
This paper presented a KG for prosonography information in VRTI-KG. In this work, we
address data visualisation for domain specialists, technical discussions, and biographical data
structure by balancing searchability and performance taking into account user experience
without overwhelming them.
An interdisciplinary project requires close collaboration from different domains and it is
crucial to meet the demands and provide solutions. It was discovered that balancing performance
and searchability is an important point in selecting the right tools. Using out-of-the-box tools
only requires minimal configuration, quick setup and deployment, they are economical both in
terms of time and money. They also arrive ready to install. They are not, however, made to meet
the particular requirements of the domain experts, hence they are limited in customisation and
lack some functionality. While these technologies provided a temporary solution, longer-term
implementation is requiring more reliable solutions to be developed.
It is hoped that the VRTI historians will now have a platform to quickly add, modify, and
visualise data thanks to the VRTI-KG Editor tool. As a future work, we will continue to develop
this editor and conduct a Post-Study System Usability Questionnaire to measure the usability of
the interface and apprehend the satisfaction and understanding of the users.
Acknowledgments
Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland (VRTI) is funded by the Government of Ireland, through the
Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media, under the Project Ireland
2040 framework. The project is also partially supported by the ADAPT Centre for Digital
Content Technology under the SFI Research Centres Programme (Grant 13/RC/2106_P2).
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