Dutch Ships and Sailors

Dutch Ships and Sailors is a project that aims to provide an infrastructure for maritime historical datasets, linking correlating data through semantic web technology. It brings together datasets related to recruitment and shipping in the East-India trade (mainly 18th century) and in the shipping of the northern provinces of the Netherlands (mainly 19th century). For the northern provinces, the database contains data on the personnel recruited, the ships, and other variables (muster rolls of the northern provinces of the Netherlands). Dutch Ships and Sailors is a CLARIN IV-project, hosted by Huygens ING in collaboration with VU University Amsterdam, the International Institute of Social History and Scheepvaartmuseum Amsterdam. This prioject resulted in the Dutch Ships and Sailors (DSS) data cloud. This Linked Data cloud brings together four Dutch maritime historical datasets, each with its own datamodel. The data is available as five-star linked data making sharing and reuse possible. The data is integrated at a meta-level through common vocabularies and linked to generic external data sources allowing for new types of queries and analysis. The first two datasets ("Generale Zeemonsterrollen VOC" and "Noordelijke Monsterollen Databases") are modeled and converted in close collaboration with the historical researchers responsible for the source datasets and we describe them in more detail. The third ("VOC Opvarenden") and fourth ("Dutch Asiatic Shipping") datasets are conversions of previously published historical datasets and are described less elaborately. They were converted with the help of the historians. These four datasets are mapped to a "DSS interoperability layer", which describes common classes, properties and concepts. Links between datasets have been established through either this interoperability layer or through converting references in the original data into explicit links. The data is made available in RDF/turtle format, but is also live served at http://dutchshipsandsailors.nl/data or http://semanticweb.cs.vu.nl/dss/ The five datasets of this project can be found via the links under 'relations'