Zen and the Art of Linked Data: New Strategies for a Semantic Web of Humanist Knowledge

© 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The World Wide Web of pages has revolutionized the way we publish, exchange, and collaborate with information. However, a vast network of content based on publishing pages creates problems for effective search, discovery, and reuse. The Linked Open Data movement seeks to remedy these limitations by supporting a new Web of Data. While the popularity and availability of Linked Open Data increase, it does not necessarily support understanding or provide the context and meaning to make it useful for humanist researchers. It also does not necessarily include the scientific requirements of transparency and reproducibility. The complex and heterogeneous nature of humanities datasets, together with the different contexts or perspectives that they contain, require the addition of meaning (semantics) to make them useful, yet the Semantic Web has become the poor relation in term of adoption, despite promising the elements to support high-quality digital humanities projects, and create a Web of data that better represents human knowledge.