Background: What is the Semantic Web?

In the readings for module 1, we suggested that you read Frederick W. Gibbs and Trevor J. Owens' article "The Hermeneutics of Data and Historical Writing." Gibbs and Owens argue that the availability of digital materials is contributing to epistemic shifts in the humanities. Indeed, one of the primary activities that falls under the rubric of "digital humanities" is digitization: making primary source materials available in digital form in online repositories.

Putting materials online is important and valuable, but it is just a first step: to truly take advantage of digitization, we also require ways to discover relevant materials stored across disparate repositories. In order to use computers to aid discovery online, those computers need to have a certain degree of understanding of what documents are, and how they can be related to each other. We attempt to accomplish this using the concept of the semantic web. 

Take a look at this page for a brief introduction to the semantic web. Also, be sure to read Tim Berners-Lee's article, "The Semantic Web" on the readings page.

As you'll learn on the introduction linked above, Resource Description Framework (RDF) is one of the core technologies of the Semantic Web. RDF is a language for expressing semantic relationships. For an introduction to RDF, please read this short article.

By the end of this module, we'd like you to be able to export your Zotero collections to RDF.