Network of Terms

Linked Data is an import data integration technology for building services with data coming from distributed sources. But for successful integration links referring to shared concepts, places, persons, etc are crucial. The Network of Terms provides a solutions for finding URIs of these shared definitions in an easy way.

There is an increasing amount of authoritative data being published as Linked Data through initiatives from governments, knowledge institutions or (wiki)communities. The Network of Terms offers an standardized way of querying these sources using federated querying and returning the results in a harmonized model. It offers a GraphQL API with a simple JSON payload for easy integration in other registration systems (which often lack Linked Data capabilities).

The Network of Terms was build as a supporting tool for creating and maintaining Linked Data in the Dutch Cultural Heritage Sector. It currently offers access to over 40 different terminology sources available through organisations on different levels: international (Getty, Europe, Wikidata, Iconclass, etc), national (national thesauri for books, artists, cultural heritage, etc) or regional (historical lists of buildings/churches, historical streetnames, etc). In Augusts 23 our NDE instance processed over 60 million queries with a success rate of over 99%.

The Network of Terms has been implemented in almost all major Collection Registration Systems in use in the Dutch Heritage sector. The software is fully configurable to support different use cases using different terminology sources. No programming skills are required to change the configuration only basic knowledge of SPARQL and JSON is needed.

To support bulk processing for reconciliation the Network of Terms offers a Reconciliation Service API compliant with the specification. This means that every terminology source configured in the Network of Terms is also available for use within reconciliation tools like OpenRefine.