Knowledge Graph-based Research Data Integration for NFDI4Culture and Beyond
Creators: name: Steller, Jonatan Jalle
name: Tietz, Tabea
name: Söhn, Linnaea Charlotte
name: Sack, Harald
name: Fliegl, Heike
name: Schrade, Torsten
name: Büttner, Alexandra
name: Posthumus, Etienne
name: Bruns, Oleksandra
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2025
Subjects: nfdi4culture
knowledge graph
semantic web
research data management

description: Each NFDI consortium establishes research data infrastructures tailored to its specific domain. To facilitate interoperability across different domains and consortia, the NFDIcore ontology has been developed [1]. It serves as a mid-level ontology to represent metadata about NFDI resources, e.g. agents, projects, data portals, etc. NFDIcore establishes mappings to an array of standards across domains, including the Basic Formal Ontology, schema.org, DCTERMS, and DCAT. For domain-specific research questions, NFDIcore is extended following a modular approach, as e.g., with the NFDI-MatWerk ontology (MWO), the NFDI4DataScience ontology (NFDI4DSO), the NFDI4Memory ontology (MO), and the NFDI4Culture ontology (CTO). 

CTO represents resources within the NFDI4Culture domains Architecture, Musicology, Art History, Media Science, and the Performing Arts. The ontology addresses domain-specific research questions, connects diverse cultural entities, and facilitates the efficient organization, retrieval, and analysis of cultural data.

The interconnection of NFDI consortia by means of Linked Open Data (LOD) opens up new research horizons. Hence, a workflow, which includes data discovery, harvesting, preprocessing, mapping, and integration into a KG is required, which is described on the use case of the NFDI4Culture KG. The NFDI4Culture KG acts as a single point of access to various decentralized research data resources and aggregates diverse and isolated data from the research domain, enabling discoverability, interoperability and reusability of CH data.

The KG consists of the Research Information Graph (RIG), describing metadata such as publishers, standards, and licenses, and the Research Data Graph (RDG), interconnecting the content metadata provided by data portals. Taking into account the challenges and objectives of NFDI4Culture to aggregate a diverse landscape of CH research data, we have designed a Python package of reusable LOD components, harvesters using these components, a SPARQL endpoint explorer (shmarql), and an ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) environment[2]. The latter consists of six modular workflow components, adaptable for independent use or within a comprehensive, automated ingest routine:

1: Run harvest routines. This uses RDF-based action files with schema.org step definitions to scrape data with external tools, link the feed to its RIG metadata, and generate persistent resource identifiers. To ensure harmonization, Python-based transformations convert resources in common cultural-heritage data formats into nfdicore/cto triples when needed.

2: Clean harvested data. To ensure harmonization between the harvested data feed and its associated action file, triples representing the harvesting state are added or deleted.

3: Commit harvest state. Changes made by a harvesting run are pushed to the pipeline’s own repository to ensure up-to-date action files.

4: Prepare and index data. If there are changes in a data feed, data directories are automatically updated or created and search indexes are produced.

5: Build a new endpoint. To prevent downtimes, a new SPARQL endpoint container is built while the previous version remains available. Once the new endpoint becomes operational, the old container is stopped and removed.

6: Publish statistics. Statistics about the integrated data feeds are published in a dashboard. It supports data analysis and visualizations based on provided SPARQL queries.

 

[1] https://ise-fizkarlsruhe.github.io/nfdicore/

[2] https://gitlab.rlp.net/adwmainz/nfdi4culture/knowledge-graph/culture-kg-kitchen