In the NIE-INE project an infrastructure is developed to ensure long-term storage of data of scientific edition projects in the Humanities at the University of Basel.
For this purpose the existing platform Knora-SALSAH of the Digital Humanities Lab is used.
The essence of the infrastructure is that data, stored in e.g. a MySQL relational database, are converted to a different machine-readable format, i.e. one that makes the semantics of the data explicit.
In the development stage (see figure) a series of vocabularies or ontologies is created that will be used to express the data in Turtle (.ttl) syntax. These semantic models adhere to the model theory of W3C RDF, RDFS, and OWL Full.
Further a comma-separated values (CSV)-file is created to enable the mapping between the old (e.g. MySQL) and the new (RDF/S-OWL) data format.
A script written in Python (.py) will use at runtime the CSV-mapping file to convert the original data to a JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) or JSON-LD (for Linked Data) format, which in turn will pass via a REST (Representational state transfer) Web service the Knora API, and finally be stored in an RDF graph database (triple store).
