RE: FAQ- structured data about historical book collections

Dear Colin,

Your question is quite deep, it's not a FAQ at all :-)

> historical book collections, for instance the catalog of 1000 books in the Frankfurt Public Library two centuries ago.

I'd say the Library community is currently at a cross-roads: 
everyone thinks MARC Must Die, but a clear RDF winning approach is not yet established.

I think all the suggestions given so far are good (except PROV).
You will indeed find the list here useful:
http://lov.okfn.org/dataset/lov/details/vocabularySpace_Library.html

However, two very relevant suggestions are missing above:

1. CIDOC CRM
It's an ontology for cultural heritage, historic information/events, archeology, etc.
E.g. http://collection.britishmuseum.org is represented in this way.
It's 2.5M objects and almost 1B triples, see here:
http://www.ontotext.com/sites/default/files/publications/CRM-reasoning.pdf 

> travel - to show that persons X and Y took a trip together, traveling say from place M to place N, leaving at one time and arriving at another.

Use crm:E9_Move. 
You can see the description of this class here:
http://personal.sirma.bg/vladimir/crm/entity_list_cleaned.html#E9_Move
X and Y should be linked using both P14_carried_out_by, and P25_moved

2. FRBRoo
It's a CRM extension that gives you means to describe bibliographic events in a lot of depth (e.g. re editions, translations, derivations, etc)
It's developed jointly by IFLA and CIDOC CRM (including people from BnF and other libraries).
It's used by the Polish Digital Library, the French bibliographic agency ABES, etc.

The big benefit of CRM+FRBRoo is that you can represent almost all of your data in one coherent ontology (and its extension).
Otherwise you'd need to mix and match from many different ontologies, and describe your "Application Profile" in detail.
This diversity will also make it harder for your consumers to comprehend your Application Profile.

> enrollment in a class - to describe person X as having taken class C from person Y.

I'd use some eLearning ontology for this.
I think there is a W3C group on eLearning and semantics, and I've heard of a "lifetime experiences" ontology.
Google "Semantic e-Learning"

> I would ideally also like to find one or two people who do LOD work and work on historical humanities data, such as book or manuscript
> collections - we are trying to find some people who might be willing to serve as (very occasional) advisors to the next stage of our project.

I'd be glad to help. My contacts are below.

Regards!
--
Vladimir Alexiev, PhD, PMP
Lead, Data and Ontology Management Group
Ontotext Corp, www.ontotext.com
Sirma Group Holding, www.sirma.com
Email: vladimir.alexiev@ontotext.com, skype:valexiev1  
Mobile: +359 888 568 132, SMS: 359888568132@sms.mtel.net
Landline: +359 (988) 106 084, Fax: +359 (2) 975 3226
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Received on Friday, 17 January 2014 07:04:54 UTC