Linking the Dutch Civil Registry: progress in designing a new Linked Data-based pipeline

Rick J. Mourits, International Institute of Social History

Civil certificates – registrations of birth, marriage, and death – contain a wealth of information regarding occupations, age at marriage, mortality, etcetera. Within the Netherlands, transcripts of millions of birth, marriage, and death have become available due to the efforts of city, regional, and provincial archives. A nation-wide data pipeline is required to make this information available to scholars within the historical, life, and social sciences. A collaboration between the CBG|Centre for family history, the International Institute of Social History (IISH), and the Common Lab Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (CLARIAH) have been working on tools to share data, reconstruct families and life courses, and check the quality of these family reconstitutions. This resulted in a pipeline based on Linked Data, which creates new possibilities for linking, analyzing, and reporting data. In our presentation we show how Linked Data’s focus on formal descriptions of data structures and open licenses incentivized us to construct a nation-wide pipeline, based on community metadata standards, open-source software, and FAIR publishing of results.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 122. Designing and Evaluating Data Pipelines