From the Trenches: The Muninn Trench Coordinates API
Robert Warren, Big Data Institute
Linked Geo Data Workshop, Wednesday March 5th, 2013, 16:30
Campus London, 4-5 Bonhill Street, London EC2A 4BX
 

How to read a British Trench Map of the Western Front

Robert Warren, Big Data Institute

Dalhousie University Club Pub, February 26th, 2014, 7pm

The original title to this blog post was supposed to be "Hardening SPARQL Servers in the wild". But I've since changed it to "Why you need a SPARQL server" after reading a number of articles critical of SPARQL while at the same time juggling RDF/OWL sources without SPARQL stores and a multitude of APIs. The benefits of having a machine readable export format is gaining traction with data providers as a data-delivery model. However, the lack of support for search and discovery is still hampering data-delivery.

A second dictionary has been added to the Muninn ontologies pages based on the Tommy's Dictionary of the Trenches by Arthur Guy Empey in the book Over The Top.

A talk titled "Open Historical Map : Re-using outdated information" will be presented by David Evans at the State of the Map conference in Birmingham this Friday at 14:20 GMT. The talk is about the Open Historical Map, an offshot of the Open Street Map, that concerns itself with historical GIS information.

Perhaps you think you're funny?

I'd like to see you pull a prank that still causes problems 100 years after the fact.

Take a look at this group of soldiers from the CEF. They pulled a prank on their enlistment officer about their date of birth. A good one.

The First World War took many by surprise. The speed of the German advance and the expectation of a short war meant that no large scale maps of mainland Europe were available. Another problem with war preparation in that era is that mapping another country was a certain sign of impending invasion, to the point that official surveyors would sometimes get arrested by the local authorities for spying.

I have converted the US Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms into an RDF SKOS dictionary that can be used to link RDF documents into an authoritive term list or to disambiguate terms.

Wikiwar is a new project that takes the crowd sourcing approach to the review of archives from the Second World War. Currently it is in alpha trials but the KML demo posted on the website looks very promising.

The Muninn Military and Organization ontologies have been released in OWL format on the Muninn RDF server and comments are welcome. These provide ontological terms for the markup of information about historical data and they provide more depth in terms of supporting changes to and the lineage of entities.

One of the ongoing problems with RDF markup and ontologies is that most of them are meant to support the expression of facts about the world as it currently is and not as it was or will be. This can create some issues in that most data is meant to be true at only one point in time.

The ontology includes support for military ranks, roles, organization types and service-specific chains of commands. Limited NATO rank equivalencies are provided and the country specific rank instances are being worked on. Any comments and suggestions are welcome.