Course 6: Open Linked Data and the Semantic Web
Lukas Rosenthaler · University of Basel
Lecturer
Lukas Rosenthaler is Professor and Head of the Digital Humanities Lab at the University of Basel, an interdisciplinary research group with over two decades of experience in digital imaging, long-term preservation of digital data, and computational humanities infrastructure. His research focuses on RDF-based data models, linked open data, and semantic technologies for cultural heritage collections, and he has led major projects such as the Bernoulli-Euler Online platform and various digital edition initiatives using graph-based representations. He advocates for open and semantically rich approaches to research data that connect collections across institutions and support logical inference. Rosenthaler has played a central role in shaping Swiss and European digital humanities infrastructure through his leadership in digital archiving and virtual research environments.
🤖 Bio generated by AI from public academic profile. Homepage · ORCID
Lecture Overview
Overview
Rosenthaler frames metadata as the condition of possibility for working with digital cultural objects. His lecture explains why digital assets do not “speak for themselves,” why traditional databases are often too rigid for humanities data, and how graph-based models support linked open data.
Main Points
- Metadata gives digital objects context, meaning, and research value; without it, an image, sound file, or text remains poorly interpretable.
- Relational databases are useful but often too inflexible for heterogeneous, deeply connected humanities data.
- Graph databases model resources and their relations through nodes, edges, and triples, making it easier to represent complex semantic networks.
- Linked open data and RDF allow researchers to describe objects, connect them across collections, and add explicit semantics through ontologies.
- The lecture also highlights logical inference as an advantage of semantic data models.
Examples Mentioned
- A wartime airplane photograph whose meaning depends on metadata
- Musician, band, and instrument relations as a graph
- Resources, predicates, and literal values in RDF triples
Source transcript: transcripts/Course 6_Rosenthaler_LOD.txt
Further Reading
See Zotero collection for 5 selected publications by this lecturer.