JudaicaLink: A Knowledge Base for Jewish Culture and History

Abstract

JudaicaLink is a novel resource which provides a knowledge base of Jewish culture and history. It is based on multilingual domain-specific information from encyclopedias and general-purpose knowledge bases such as The Integrated Authority File (GND) of the German National Library. JudaicaLink can be used for contextualization of metadata, i.e., entity resolution within and linking of metadata to improve resource access and to provide richer context to the user. Many resources for contextualization, particularly specialized resources for the given domain, are only available in unstructured form. General-purpose resources like DBpedia are hard to use due to their sheer size while only a very small subset of the data is actually relevant. Therefore, JudaicaLink aims at integrating relevant subsets of various data sources to function as a single hub for the contextualization process. JudaicaLink is freely available on the Web as Linked Open Data. In this paper, we explain how JudaicaLink is built, how it can be accessed by users, as well as its architecture, technical implementation, applications and relations to Jewish culture.