Breaking Down Data Silos: SPARQuLb, An RDF Ecosystem to Mutualize Humanities Research Projects Needs

For many humanities researchers, managing the structured data collected or produced as part of their research projects is a technical challenge. In the past, the services of external service providers have been heavily relied upon for this purpose, resulting not only in high costs but also in a large number of isolated data silos scattered all over the university's servers, which are usually not maintained professionally and quickly become obsolete. In this article, we present an original solution to this problem, deployed at the Université libre de Bruxelles by Præsto, the digital humanities support platform working closely with the libraries. It consists in the deployment of a shared RDF ecosystem within which all humanities researchers can integrate their databases, which then become sub-graphs of the global knowledge graph. The long-term maintenance, training and support associated with such an ecosystem are then mutualized and thus greatly facilitated. We describe the solution we have implemented, its advantages and disadvantages, and the difficulties we have encountered, along three lines. Firstly, the theoretical aspect: the principles of Link Open Data and RDF on which it is based. Secondly, the practical aspect: the Wikibase software at the heart of our ecosystem, its deployment and use. Thirdly, the semantic aspect: the schema choices we've made to enable all these different databases to coexist.