Christopher Guy Yocum

ORCID: 0000-0002-7241-3264

With the newest release of IrishGen 20220907.1, the Agrelon ontology is fully incorporated in the IrishGen database. This will allow users to query IrishGen based on either the Relationship Ontology or Agrelon. I would recommend using Agrelon from 20220709.1 onward for reasons set out in this post.

At this point there is not much more than can be done with IrishGen in its current form. To get where it is, I used CELT transcriptions of LL and Rawl. B502. Other information was transcribed from published genealogical sources which were easily transcribed. For the medieval Irish genealogies, that is not the whole corpus. There are many other genealogical corpora. Currently, there are 38 open MS corpora as recorded in the IrishGen project page. To get these into IrishGen, I would need to transcribe them into a file then translate them into RDF. This is a laborious process that, while valuable in its own right, will take time and money and is overwhelming for a single individual to do. I started on NLS Adv MS 72.1.6 so I may return to that. In the long run, IrishGen may not grow very quickly without more volunteers or some other solution coming to light.

One last thing that IrishGen needs that may be easily done is to swap the hash for the slash in the URLs that are created for each individual. The reason for this is that the hash leaks that the database is based on files as it includes the .trig in the URL. If this were transferred to the web and put on a server, it would be much cleaner for access by browser and easier to remember.

For instance, currently to link to an individual instance in an item, someone would need to use this URL http://example.com/LL/aisneidem_di_araill.trig#Conchobuir. This is sometimes called a “leaky abstraction” as it leaks that there exists a file called aisneidem_di_araill.trig which contains the item entitled “Aisneidem Di Araill” and that it is in the TRiG file format. To hide this from someone looking at a URL, swapping the # for a / will do that and make a few other things possible. A URL that uses a slash will look like http://example.com/LL/aisneidem_di_araill/Conchobuir. In this situation you can easily parse the URL this way http://example.com + MS + Item + Individual Instance. Thus if a user requests http://example.com/LL/aisneidem_di_araill/, they will get the metadata back about that item from the server. If they request http://example.com/LL, they can get the metadata about the manuscript. This hides the fact that the entire database is a set of flat files on Github as the user will likely never care about that and indeed should not care. Moreover, the underlying database (if there were to be one online in the future), would only need to run a SPARQL describe query to return all known information about a requested URL.

I will concentrate on the hash/slash swap which will be a bit tricky as I will need to keep the owl:sameAs links that are in the files consistent if they change. I have scripts which will help me detect this so it is only a minor annoyance. The next thing after that is much more daunting which is transcribing genealogical corpora which have not been published. I will probably pick up NLS Adv MS 72.1.6 again which has some of its contents published here as TEI XML. I am not sure if it would be worth doing all the context work to attempt a proper publication out of it (or any of the other genealogical corpora) but I may explore what the options are once I get that far.