Linked data for humanities research — The SPQR experiment

Ancient texts represent a primary source for research in the classics. A substantial body of digital material has evolved enriching these texts. Unfortunately these data are often distributed across myriad locations, stored in diverse and incompatible formats and are either not available online or are made available only in isolation. This paper describes an investigation into using linked data principles and technologies to build bridges between these islands of data to deliver an integrated data landscape through which researchers can explore and so seek to understand this data. The evaluation revealed that researchers were of the opinion that the linked data representation, and its visualisation as graphs, offers an intuitive and usable means of exploring and understanding the data, exceeding the capabilities offered by current online portals to classics data.