BiographyNet project

This page collects most information from the original Biographynet project page.

About the project

BiographyNet is a multidisciplinary project that combines expertise from history, computer science and computational linguistics. The project is a collaboration between the Netherlands eScience Center, Huygens ING and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

The Biography Portal of the Netherlands links more than 75.000 Dutch people mentioned in various databases, through a limited set of metadata. This project aims to enhance its potential for historical research by transforming the available data into a semantic knowledge base and through the creation of a demonstrator. BiographyNet is a multidisciplinary project that combines expertise from history, computer science and computational linguistics.

The lead questions for the design of a semantic demonstrator are: Which relations can we reveal between people and events, geographical movements and networks between people? What do they tell historians about the formation of Dutch society and the ‘boundaries of the Netherlands’?

The current search engine lacks the analytic tools to show interconnections, trends, geographical maps, time lines, etc. This project aims to strengthen the value of the portal and comparable biographical datasets for historical research, by improving the search options and the presentation of its outcomes, starting from the Simple Event Model. The demonstrator will add a semantic layer on to the current Biography Portal. This layer can also include information from external resources, such as museum objects or Wikipedia. Ultimately, the project may help to reveal unknown relations between people and events by linking data that has mainly been studied in isolation so far.

Resources

  • The video presentation above provides an overview of the BiographyNet project so far.
  • Knowledge Graph: at http://data.biographynet.nl you can find an online triple store with the RDF triples produced within the project. These are accessible through SPARQL as well.
  • The following NLP tools are being used for text mining in BiographyNet.
    • The OpeNER named entity recognizer: indicates which words refer to a person, organization, location or other named entity
    • HeidelTime: identifies temporal expressions and normalizes them
    • The UKB Word Sense Disambiguation system: identifies which WordNet sense is most likely in a given context
    • Ontotagger: identifies the ontological class of a given word, for instance the FrameNet frame of a given verb
    • Semantic Role Labeler: identifies which role a participant plays in a given event
    • Metadata identifier: identifies information from metadata in text

The team

  • Researchers
    • Niels Ockeloen
    • Antske Fokkens
    • Serge ter Braake
  • Principal investigators
    • Guus Schreiber, VU Computer Science
    • Els Kloek, Huygens ING
    • Susan Legêne, VU History
    • Piek Vossen, VU CLTL
  • Project managers
    • Sebastiaan Derks, Huygens ING
    • Victor de Boer, VU Computer Science
  • Academy Assistants
    • Yassine Karimi, VU Computer Science
    • Miel Groten, VU History
The three main researchers: Niels, Antske and Serge

Publications

Papers

  • Antske Fokkens, Serge ter Braake, Niels Ockeloen, Piek Vossen, Susan Legêne, Guus Schreiber, Victor de Boer. BiographyNet: Extracting Relations Between People and Events. In: Á. Z. Bernád, C. Gruber, M. Kaiser eds., Europa baut auf Biographien: Aspekte, Bausteine, Normen und Standards für eine europäische Biographik (New Academic Press 2017, ISBN: 978-3-7003-2069-2). p. 193-224.
  • Niels Ockeloen, Victor de Boer, Tobias Kuhn, and Guus Schreiber. Data 2 Documents: Modular and distributive content management in RDF. In:Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management: 20th International Conference, EKAW 2016, Proceedings (p 447-462), Springer (Bologna, Italy, November 19-23 2016). Winner best paper award.
  • Serge ter Braake, Antske Fokkens, Ronald Sluijter, Thierry Declerck and Eveline Wandl-Vogt (editors). Proceedings of the first conference on Biographical Data in a Digital World 2015 (Amsterdam the Netherlands, April 9th, 2015)
  • Serge ter Braake and Antske Fokkens, How to Make it in History. Working Towards a Methodology of Canon Research with Digital Methods in: S. ter Braake, A. Fokkens, R. Sluijter, T. Declerck and E. Wandl-Vogt eds., Biographical Data in a Digital World 2015. Proceedings of the first Conference on Biographical Data in a Digital World 2015 (Amsterdam, the Netherlands, April 9th, 2015) 85-93.
  • Niels Ockeloen RDF based management, syndication and aggregation of web content in: 19th International Conference on Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management, Satellite Event proceedings, Springer 2015 (Linköping, Sweden, November 2014)
  • Serge ter Braake, Antske Fokkens and Fred van Lieburg, ‘Mining Ministers (1572-1815). Using Semi-structured Data for Historical Research‘ in: L.M. Aiello and D. McFarland eds., 6th International Conference on Social Informatics (workshops) (Springer 2014). 279-283. Online publication belonging to this paper: a prosopography of Dutch ministers.
  • Antske Fokkens, Aitor Soroa, Zuhaitz Beloki, Niels Ockeloen, German Rigau, Willem Robert van Hage and Piek Vossen (2014) NAF and GAF: Linking Linguistic Annotations. In: Proceedings of the 10th Joint ACL – ISO Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation, Reykjavik, Iceland, May 2014.
  • Antske Fokkens, Serge Ter Braake, Niels Ockeloen, Piek Vossen, Susan Legêne and Guus Schreiber (2014) BiographyNet: Methodological Issues when NLP supports historical research. In: Proceedings of the 9th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), Reykjavik, Iceland, May 2014.
  • Niels Ockeloen, Antske Fokkens, Serge ter Braake, Piek Vossen, Victor de Boer, Guus Schreiber and Susan Legêne (2013) BiographyNet: Managing Provenance at multiple levels and from different perspectives. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on Linked Science (LiSC) at ISWC 2013, Sydney, Australia, October 2013.
  • Antske Fokkens, Marieke van Erp, Marten Postma, Ted Pedersen, Piek Vossen and Nuno Freire (2013) Offspring from Reproduction Problems: What Replication Failure Teaches Us. In: Proceedings of ACL 2013, Sofia, Bulgaria, August 2013.
  • Serge ter Braake, ‘Het individu en zijn tijdgenoten. Wat een biograaf kan doen met prosopografie en biografische woordenboeken’, Tijdschrift voor Biografie 2 (summer 2013) vol. 2, 52-61.
  • Antske Fokkens, Marieke van Erp, Piek Vossen, Sara Tonelli, Willem Robert van Hage, Luciano Serafini, Rachele Sprugnoli and Jesper Hoeksema (2013) GAF: A Grounded Annotation Framework for Events. The 1st Workshop on Events: Definition, Detection, Coreference, and Representation. Workshop in conjunction with NAACL-HLT 2013, Atlanta, GA, USA, June 2013.
  • Marieke Van Erp, Antske Fokkens, Piek Vossen, Sara Tonelli, Willem Robert Van Hage, Luciano Serafini, Rachele Sprugnoli and Jesper Hoeksema. 2013. Denoting Data in the Grounded Annotation Framework. ISWC 2013 Posters and Demos. Sydney Australia, 21-25 October 2013.
  • Niels Ockeloen, Victor de Boer and Lora Aroyo (2013) LDtogo: A Data Querying and Mapping Framework for Linked Data Applications. Demonstration track at ESWC 2013, Montpellier, France.

Presentations

  • 9 April 2015, Biographical Data in a Digital World, How to make it in History. Working towards a methodology of canon research (poster presentation), Serge ter Braake and Antske Fokkens
  • 21 November 2014, God in Nederland 3.0, Amsterdam, Een nieuwe prosopografie van predikanten: mogelijkheden en valkuilen van DH-tools Serge ter Braake and Antske Fokkens. [slides]
  • 20 November 2014, eHumanities group, Amsterdam, BiographyNet: Linking the world of History Susan Legêne, Serge ter Braake, Niels Ockeloen, Piek Vossen and Antske Fokkens. [slides]
  • 10 November 2014, Histoinformatics, Barcelona, Mining Ministers (1572-1815) Using Semi-structured Data for Historical Research Serge ter Braake, Antske Fokkens and Fred van Lieburg. [slides]
  • 21 October 2014, Crash Course Digital Humanities, Amsterdam, BiographyNet: Linked Data, NLP Pipeline and Computational Thinking Serge ter Braake, Antske Fokkens and Niels Ockeloen. [slides]
  • 15 October 2014, eScience Center internal review, Amsterdam, Guus Schreiber, Antske Fokkens, Niels Ockeloen, Serge ter Braake [slides]
  • 25 September 2014, internal presentation Huygens ING, The Hague, BiographyNet: linking the world of history Guus Schreiber, Antske Fokkens, Niels Ockeloen and Serge ter Braake. [slides]
  • 26 May 2014, ISA-10: Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation. NAF and GAF: Linking Linguistic Annotations.Antske Fokkens, Aitor Soroa, Zuhaitz Beloki, Niels Ockeloen, German Rigau, Willem Robert van Hage and Piek Vossen. [slides]
  • 14 March 2014, IABA Europe reading group, NIOD Amsterdam, Serge ter Braake, Antske Fokkens
  • 14 February 2014, VU University Amsterdam, CLUE/Network Institute Meeting, Serge ter Braake, Antske Fokkens, Niels Ockeloen [slides]
  • 17 January 2014, CLIN 2014, Leiden CLIN_2014. Antske Fokkens, Niels Ockeloen, Serge ter Braake, Piek Vossen, Guus Schreiber and Susan Legêne.
  • 14 January 2014, THATcamp, The Hague, Prosopografie en bi(o)g(rafische) data Serge ter Braake [slides]
  • 15 November 2013, Digital Humanities: Critical views and experiences: Workshop organized by e-Humanities Group KNAW, Amsterdam, 15 November 2013 Provenance and bi(o)g(graphical) data (Serge ter Braake, Antske Fokkens, Niels Ockeloen, Rik Hoekstra, Susan Legêne, Piek Vossen, Guus Schreiber)
  • 10 October 2013, Huygens ING, (Serge, Antske, Niels, Susan, Piek)
  • Oktober 2013. Linked Science (LISC), ISWC 2013. BiographyNet: Managing Provenance at multiple levels and from different perspectives. Niels Ockeloen, Antske Fokkens, Serge ter Braake, Piek Vossen, Victor de Boer, Guus Schreiber, and Susan Legêne. [PowerPoint] [PDF]
  • September 2013. eScience Center. BiographyNet. Piek Vossen, Serge ter Braake, Niels Ockeloen, Antske Fokkens, Susan Legêne and Lora Aroyo. [Slides]
  • March 2013. eScience Center. BiographyNet. Guus Schreiber, Susan Legêne, Serge ter Braake, Niels Ockeloen and Antske Fokkens. [Slides]
  • March 2013. NIAS Workshop. Public-Private Initiatives in Digital Humanities. BiographyNet. Piek Vossen. [Slides]

Videos