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Thu, July 24, 2014

Encyclopedia of Russian Jewry released, Updates to YIVO Encyclopedia


After the first release of the YIVO encyclopedia, we are very happy to announce now the first release of the Encyclopedia of Russian Jewry as Linked Open Data on JudaicaLink. With this release, we also updated the LOD version of the YIVO encyclopedia and fixed several bugs.

Details on both encyclopediae can be found here, together with basic statistics. There are also bookmarklets for an easy access of the Linked Data representations.

JudaicaLink now provides access to 22,808 concepts in English (~ 10%) and Russian (~ 90%), mostly locations and persons. With this release, we now created Linked Data versions of both encyclopediae that gave us the permission. Spread the word and help us to convince more publishers to follow. Our next steps are the creation of links between the two encyclopediae and links to external sources like DBpedia or Geonames.

As a starting point, here are links to the concept “Moscow” in both encyclopediae:

http://data.judaicalink.org/data/yivo/Moscow

http://data.judaicalink.org/data/rujen/moskva

Besides browsing our Linked Data representations, all data can also be accessed directly via our SPARQL endpoint. Additionally, we provide a query form for your convenience. The source code of the crawler scripts is available on GitHub, please use our issue tracker to communicate any problems with the data. If you want to understand exactly where the data comes from, then you can find both the crawler revision and the revision of the rdf writer (GIT Hashes) attached to every single concept, plus the timestamp when the data was actually fetched from the encyclopedia website.



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