LOD at #dh2015, #lodlam and #ww1hack in Sydney, Australia

It was a busy July in Sydney Australia for everyone with the LODLAM Summit, Digital Humanities Conferences and World War One hack day back to back! This blog post is a short synopsis of the events that occurred over was an stimulating and interesting week.

The State Library of New South Wales hosted the 2015 Linked Open Data Summit. In typical un-conference style, a number of birds of a session occurred including one on the First World War (sessions notes here and here) that resulted in the creation of a generic Linked Open Data subject heading for the war that has already been written about here. 

The LOD challenge at LODLAM had three entries related to the war with Agate World War I by Clare Job, Rebecca Daly, Susan Jones, and Noel Broadhead all from the University of Wollongong, Core Contextual Reader by Thea Lindquist (University of Colorado Boulder) and Eetu Mäkelä (Aalto University)  and by Muninn’s entry by Rob Warren (Muninn Project) and Mark Farrell (University of Waterloo). 

The University of Western Sydney was the site of the Digital Humanities Conference 2015 where a number of presentations related to the Great War and Linked Open Data occurred. A panel "Linked Open Data and the First World War" kicked things off with presentations by Kathryn Rose (Memorial University, Dominion of Newfoundland), Mia Ridge (Trinity College, Dublin), Rob Warren (Big Data Institute, Dominion of Canada), and Valentine Charles (Europeana Foundation, The Netherlands). A full blog post is being written up on the Europeana blog. Other presentations about similar approaches included "Beyond the Library Walls: The National Library of Wales Research Programme in Digital Collections" by Rhian James and Paul McCann (National Library of Wales, UK) and "Language, Cultural Influences and Intelligence in Historical Gazetteers of the Great War" by Rob Warren (Muninn Project).

A related presentation about Linked Open Data included "Sounding It Out: The Mariposa Folk Festival and a Linked Open Data Digital Library Prototype" by  Stacy Allison-Cassin et al., "An Entity based Approach to Interoperability in the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory" by Susan Brown at al., "Accidental Discovery, Intentional Inquiry: Leveraging Linked Data to Uncover the Women of Jazz" by Cristina Pattuelli et al. and "From the Holocaust: Victims’ Names to the Description of the Persecution of the European Jews in Nazi Years: The Linked Data Approach and a New Domain Ontology. The Italian Pilot Project" by Mazzini and Brazzo who also won the LODLAM Challenge.

Finally, the State Library of New South Wales hosted a hackday on the First World War as part of the greater GovHack competition happening throughout Australia. Some serious hacking happened including the beginnings of a Linked Open Data name authority file for every ANZAC soldier of the war. Other projects included the tracking of Indian soldier and there is noise about further Gallipoli GIS resources for World War One research.

Finally, the wizards over at the Auckland War Memorial Museum ended the week with a bang by announcing that it was taking its collections data online along with its online Cenotaph into an integrated online API! which should open the doors for interesting collaborations and linking opportunities!