LODE: Linking digital humanities content to the web of data

Numerous digital libraries projects maintain their data collections in the form of text, images, and metadata. While data may be stored in many formats, from plain text to XML to relational databases, the use of the resource description framework (RDF) as a standardized representation has gained considerable traction during the last five years. Almost every digital humanities meeting has at least one session concerned with the topic of digital humanities, RDF, and linked data, including JCDL. While most existing work in linked data has focused on improving algorithms for entity matching, the aim of our Linked Open Data Enhancer Lode is to work “out of the box”, enabling their use by humanities scholars, computer scientists, librarians, and information scientists alike. With Lode we enable non-technical users to enrich a local RDF repository with high-quality data from the Linked Open Data cloud. Lode links and enhances the local RDF repository without reducing the quality of the data. In particular, we support the user in the enhancement and linking process by providing intuitive user-interfaces and by suggesting high quality linking candidates using state of the art matching algorithms. We hope that the Lode framework will be useful to digital humanities scholars complementing other digital humanities tools.