Nominees
Archive Catalogs are not as valuable as they could be as they lack connections with the Web of Data. aLOD enables archival institutions to easily provide a high value catalogue as Linked Open Data, by providing open source software to interlink their catalog with other datasets as well as web based applications to easily access the catalog data.
The aLOD platform provides:
* Access to federated data
By using Linked Data and RDF as data model we can combine data sets from various archival institutions and make them available to the users. We automate the Linked Data creation process for commonly used archival systems (AIS).
* Automated interlinking with reference data sets
We use technologies developed within EU FP7 research projects to automatically interlink archival material with reference data sets. This increases value of the data and provides better access to the information.
* Semantic search & powerful User Interfaces
The semantically linked information enables us to provide powerful search interfaces to our users. The interface is developed with support from archive experts used to search through these datasets. By using interlinked data sets, we can provide results across language barriers.
aLOD is developed by Zazuko GmbH since autumn 2014 in close collaboration with the Swiss Federal archive and the archives of four cantons (Basel, Geneva, Neuchâtel, Valais). It is run as a common platform and SPARQL endpoint where the partners experiment with providing archival data as Linked Data.
The goal of the project is to understand the requirements and opportunities of providing archival information as Linked Data. A small subset of the data is available at http://data.alod.ch/zack/
