SeaLiT Knowledge Graphs - Maritime History Data in RDF using a CIDOC-CRM extension (SeaLiT Ontology)

SeaLiT Knowledge Graphs is an RDF dataset of maritime history data that has been transcribed (and then transformed) from original archival sources in the context of the SeaLiT Project (Seafaring Lives in Transition, Mediterranean Maritime Labour and Shipping, 1850s-1920s). The underlying data model is the SeaLiT Ontology, an extension of the ISO standard CIDOC-CRM (ISO 21127:2014) for the modelling and integration of maritime history information. 

The knowledge graphs integrate data of totally 16 different types of archival sources:

• Crew Lists
  • Crew and displacement list (Roll)
  • Crew List (Ruoli di Equipaggio)
  • General Spanish Crew List
• Registers / Lists
  • Students Register
  • Civil Register
  • Register of Maritime Personnel
  • Register of Maritime Workers (Matricole della gente di mare)
  • Sailors Register (Libro de registro de marineros)
  • Naval Ship Register List
  • Seagoing Personnel
  • Lists of ships
• Censuses
  • Census La Ciotat
  • First National all-Russian Census of the Russian Empire
• Payrolls
  • Payrolls of private archives and libraries in Greece
  • Payrolls of Russian Steam Navigation and Trading Company
• Employment records
  • Shipyards of Messageries Maritimes, La Ciotat

More information about the archival sources are available through the SeaLiT website. Data exploration applications over these sources are also publicly available (SeaLiT Catalogues, SeaLiT ResearchSpace). 

Data from these archival sources has been transcribed in tabular form and then curated by historians of SeaLiT using the FAST CAT system. The transcripts (records), together with the curated vocabulary terms and entity instances (ships, persons, locations, organizations), are then transformed to RDF using the SeaLiT Ontology as the target (domain) model. To this end, the corresponding schema mappings between the original schemata and the ontology were defined using the X3ML mapping definition language, that were subsequently used for delivering the RDF datasets. 

More information about the FAST CAT system and the data transcription, curation and transformation processes can be found in the following paper:

P. Fafalios, K. Petrakis, G. Samaritakis, K. Doerr, A. Kritsotaki, Y. Tzitzikas, M. Doerr, "FAST CAT: Collaborative Data Entry and Curation for Semantic Interoperability in Digital Humanities", ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1145/3461460 [pdf, bib]

The RDF dataset is provided as a set of TriG files per record per archival source. For each record, the dataset provides: i) one trig file for the record's data (records.trig), ii) one trig file for the record's (curated) vocabulary terms (vocabularies.trig), and iii) four trig files for the record's (curated) entity instances (ships.trig, persons.trig, persons.trig, organizations.trig).

We also provide the RDFS files of the used ontologies (SeaLiT Ontology verson 1.0, CIDOC-CRM version 7.1.1).