Data and Web Science Group

Numerous digital humanities projects maintain their data collections in the form of text, images, and metadata. While data may be stored in many formats, from plain text to XML to relational databases, the use of the resource descrip-tion framework (RDF) as a standardized representation has gained considerable traction during the last five years. Al-most every digital humanities meeting has at least one ses-sion concerned with the topic of digital humanities, RDF, and linked data. While most existing work in linked data has focused on improving algorithms for entity matching, the aim of the LinkedHumanities project is to build digital humanities tools that work “out of the box, ” enabling their use by hu-manities scholars, computer scientists, librarians, and infor-mation scientists alike. With this paper, we report on the Linked Open Data En-hancer (Lode) framework developed as part of the Linked-Humanities project. With Lode we support non-technical users to enrich a local RDF repository with high-quality data from the Linked Open Data cloud. Lode links and en-hances the local RDF repository without compromising the quality of the data. In particular, Lode supports the user in the enhancement and linking process by providing intuitive user-interfaces and by suggesting high-quality linking candi-dates using tailored matching algorithms. We hope that the Lode framework will be useful to digital humanities scholars complementing other digital humanities tools