Based on the principles of interaction and cooperation in the field of biographical lexicography, the paper outlines the design and setup of interfaces. Interfaces enable access to both individual and sets of biographical data entries. This paper briefly describes the design of metadata mapping to semantic formats (RDF) and graphs, when metadata is provided by the historical biographical information system Deutsche Biographie. It demonstrates exemplary usages of the APIs in the historical sciences.
Recent biographical dictionaries have emerged out of scientific debate and exchange on the international and interregional levels and in cross-disciplinary discourse. The majority of current biographical dictionaries have moved content – everything from indices to complete articles – to digital media or were set up to be born digital.1 In addition, digital media has made it easy to reference ongoing historiographical research, critical editions, documentary projects, library catalogs, and archival sources. The common tasks of all lexicographers consist of extending, revising, and correcting the biographical database. Therefore, collaboration through the sharing and linking of information forms the backbone of future biographical dictionaries.
The digital transformation is confronted with the challenge of maintaining formal and scientific standards that have evolved in the past 100 years of lexicography. Current biographical dictionaries share a common set of elements or modules, e.g., names, dates, places of birth and death, family background, biographical description, and references to works, archival resources, secondary literature, portraits and authorship. These could probably be described as a common web ontology.
The similar structure of biographical articles in dictionaries allows similar strategies of visualization – ranging from static genealogical trees to dynamic relations to persons, institutions and places.
1In Europe there are only 9 national dictionaries accessible freely online: Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz – Dizionario storico della Svizzera – Dictionnaire historique de la Suisse (HLS), Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB), O¨sterreichisches Biographisches Lexikon 1815–1950 ( O¨BL) mit 2. u¨berarbeiteter Auflage ab 1815, Slovenska biografija (SBL), Nationaal Biografisch Woordenboek (NBW), Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (DBI), Biographie Nationale de Belgique (BNB), Nouvelle Biographie Nationale nume´rise´es de Belgique (NBNB), Kansallisbiografia (Finland), Norsk Biografisk Leksikon (NBL), Internetowy Polski Słownik Biograficzny (iPSB). Two others offer paid access: the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the Dictionary of Irish Biography.
Authority files appear to be key to the interfaces
of exchange and to ontology patterns and modes of
visualization. They were conceived in the bibliographical
field and proved valuable in interlinking both persons and
concepts.
The Deutsche Biographie is a joint endeavor of the Historical Commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Bavarian State Library in Munich.
Since the late 1990s, several measures have been taken to digitize two series of biographical dictionaries and to establish a website providing access to them.
The latest efforts have targeted cultural institutions, in order
to enlarge the number of notable individuals in the corpus
The aggregated database consists of parts differing in
provenance, density, and granularity of information:
Digitized biographical texts of the Allgemeine
Deutsche Biographie (ADB, 55 vols. and index vol.
published 1875–1912) and Neue Deutsche Biographie
(NDB, 26 [A–Vocke] of 28 vols. published since
1953) provide information on individuals, exact dates
of birth and death, places of birth, death, and burial,
as well as partially encoded information on entities
related to the individual. The full text of both series
have been digitized and structured in XML
The index of persons and families mentioned in ADB
and NDB was compiled manually and provides names,
years of birth and death, a hierarchy of professions,
and references to pages in the printed volumes.
Almost all index entries are aligned with the German
authority file (Gemeinsame Normdatei GND),2 and
further information can be derived from this resource
2A complete dump is available under CC0 http://www.
dnb.de/lds
The main work base of the editorial office helps to
curate the last two volumes that are to appear in
print. A subset of this work base that includes all
entries on deceased persons with a GND-identifier is
merged with the Deutsche Biographie. The dataset
includes differences in name spellings, pseudonyms,
dates and places of birth and death. The places are
rarely harmonized and aligned. While all entries are
provided with a GND-identifier, further information
from this resource can be derived
Metadata enhancement is crucial for extended search
options. The main approach is to detect entities and
determine the linguistic class they belong to, then identify
entities against a given database, and finally detect relations
and sentiments expressed with regard to them
The Deutsche Biographie’ approach relies heavily on
authority files. The index of persons was completely
equipped with GND-entries and -identifiers in cooperation
with the Bavarian State Library / Munich Digitization
Center
The structure of the articles converted from PDF to XML first covers the main parts of the article, namely the headline, the genealogy, the life summary, and the technical parts listing awards, works, sources, secondary literature, and portraits.
It then deals with entities, like personal names occurring
in verb phrases (“interpersonal relations”)
3The partnering institutions provide individual personal
information on a selection of individuals who are representative
for their collecting focus and documentary field. A complete list
can be found at https://www.deutsche-biographie.
de/partner
The “Local Grammars” at hand are capable of describing
institutional bodies (enterprises, educational institution,
theatre and music groups, political parties), administrative
geographical regions (populated places, regions, countries,
religious territories) and the proper names of certain
individual places (monasteries, churches, castles).
Finally biographical accounts refer to highly specific events
(s.
To enhance this database, different strategies were applied
to link named entities to the internal database of indexed
names. One obvious strategy relied on index entries
and calculated scores for identified personal names on a
given page in a given section (genealogy or biography),
depending on the length of the named entity and any given
birth or death dates as compared with those accounted for
in the index of names for that page
Another strategy consisted of detecting places of birth, death and burial and linking them to authority files. These place names were prominent in the headlines of each biography of an individual person and taggable by regular expressions. Twelve thousand distinct names were uniquely detectable. By accessing the web services of OpenStreetMap (OSM)4 and filtering the results by type of place and continent, about one third could be identified directly in OSM. The majority of remaining places occurred only once in the corpus and had to be aligned to OSM manually. Although OSM does not provide unique IDs, the coordinates and some additional information were reusable.
With the help of the geographical coordinates, about half of these entries could be identified / reverse-located in Geonames5. Geonames provides unique and stable identifiers, but the qualification of the type of the place differs. Even though over 36,000 GND-entries for placeor regionlike administrative territories had been aligned to Geonames, the data was incoherent. The GND referred to administrative division in Geonames, while we were using populated places.
4http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org. 5http://www.geonames.org/.
Up to now, the following have been recognized and identified (linked to index database) in the Deutsche Biographie: 340,000 personal names tagged in the corpus of ADB and NDB, of which about 145,000 are identified as database entries; 380,000 place names, of which 12,500 are places of study, 1,900 “places of worship” (religious buildings); over 163,000 place names were identified as an instance of a given place in the database; 103,000 relations found in 21,330 biographies (NDB), of which 6,200 are teacher-student relations, 1,500 friendship predicates, about 1,000 predecessor/successor predicates, and another 3,000 membership relations and about 3,100 leadership relations relating to institutions or organizations; 12,000 organizational names; 8,000 time expressions; 11,500 mentions of discipline/fields of study.
The efforts in geo-locating places led to new search options. Two start pages were introduced that provided a mapsearch and a zoomable geographical distribution of places mentioned in the Deutsche Biographie.
The notion of what an interface is ranges from intuitive user interaction surface to machine readable bit-stream. In this paper, interface is understood as a programmable datadelivering web application.
In Deutsche Biographie we mapped metadata on the entry level. This means that the RDF is directly accessible from the web-version of an individual article (s. fig. 1). Another way of mapping relations to a graph format is described below (s. sect. 3).
The APIs provided by http://data.deutschebiographie.de split up into two groups: the Beaconinterface / Beacon-Aggregator and the Solr-based search index cover about 750,000 aggregated entries in the Deutsche Biographie whereas the RDF-based SPARQLendpoint and the Neo4J-based graph-database cover only persons and families mentioned in the biographical dictionaries (about 100,000). The number of entries linked to others with an explicitly named relation shrinks to about 23,000, due to the limitations of named entity identification mentioned above.
The Beacon aggregation provided here offers a list of links to resources for a given GND-Identifier (s. fig. 3). in Munich in 2010.6 There is an informal description7 that allows for aggregation of Beacons of different origin. Most Beacon files are announced at the given Wikipedia website, others are hosted by the Historical Commission or at Findbuch.de8.
#FORMAT: BEACON #PREFIX: http://d-nb.info/gnd/ #TARGET: http://www.deutsche-biograph ie.de/pndfIDg.html#ndbcontent 118643525 118500015 ...
The Solr9 index is configured for combined searches,
autocomplete and faceted searches for names, places, and
professions. Relations between personal entries are stored
in an abbreviated serialized form (s. fig. 5). The decision to
the “factoids” proposed by
The initial data-model of Deutsche Biographie was
property based. It draws heavily on the concept of the
GND-elementset12 and initial work of
11Its current version “Erlangen based on CIDOC-CRM 6.2.2 crm.org/170309/.
12http://d-nb.info/standards/elementset/ gnd
CRM 170309” is http://erlangen
The API provides access to a graph database based on Neo4J13. The graph is modelled according to the index of persons and the structure of the printed volumes and its articles. These hierarchically ordered units (<is part of>) of text refer to entries in the person and place databases by means of edges (<occurs in, is author>). Persons may refer to a lineage (a group of family-like related individuals) <belongs to> or directly to others by named edges (<lehrer, vorgaenger, nachfolger>). A person is connected to places (<born in, died in, tomb in, active in>) and to a profession classification (<belongs to>).
A second option makes it possible to export an ego-centered graph, based on the detected relations to identified personal names in the Solr index.14 The example presented in fig. 2 shows a data sample for 13https://www.neo4j.org 14http://data.deutsche-biographie.de/beta/ open-graph This option requires the internal identifier and loads all identified relations to other persons from the Solr-index. Further options allow exports in json and graphml. It covers only biographical entries of the newer NDB-series.
Albert Einstein and all individuals in his network up to a distance of 2, together with their cross-relations amongst each other. The dataset has easily been imported into Gephi15, colored by an indexed category and visualized using a circle packing layout (Mike Bostock).
4
Recent incoming e-mail requests have showed a growing interest in accessing the data. There were genuine research questions (e.g., the network of Martin Luther, investigating German street names), integration tasks (RDF query of metadata for identified individual entries) and bridging tasks (querying personal names in a back-end for an archival CMS).
A proposal has been launched to raise funding for a web-based research laboratory that would work with the metadata encoded and aggregated in the Deutsche Biographie.
5
The work was funded by grants from the Deutsche
Forschungsgmeinschaft (DFG) for the project “Deutsche
Biographie as historical biographical information system
for German-speaking areas” in 2012 and 2015. The NDB
received funding from the German Research Foundation
(Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG) for the years
2001-03, 2008-09, and 2010-11.16
The RDF mapping was initially conceived by Martin
Bru¨mmer und Thomas Riechert within the framework of
the EU project “LOD2-PUBLINK” (s.
16http://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/ (53346764|165972532|213818920).