~ Explore Intra-Belgian book translation flows with a SAMPO-UI

Another contribution presented at the SEMANTiCS conference in Ghent was a Sampo-UI portal for the BELTRANS project. I made a small contribution to the software and the paper, working with colleagues at KBR, the Royal Library of Belgium.

Explore Intra-Belgian book translation flows with a SAMPO-UI, Sven Lieber¹, Ann Van Camp¹, Joren Six², Julie M. Birkholz¹ ²
¹ KBR — Royal Library of Belgium
² Ghent University, Department of History & Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities

The BELTRANS project studied book translations between Dutch and French from 1970 to 2020, involving at least one Belgian author, scenarist, illustrator or editor. The resulting dataset brings together publication metadata from different libraries. Making these data available is one thing; making them easy to explore is another.

The BELTRANS portal uses Sampo-UI to let researchers filter publications, browse authors and publishers, explore maps and download selected data as CSV. It uses the modernized Sampo-UI core described in my Sampo-UI Meets Ontop post. Here, the data are served by QLever, a graph database with a SPARQL endpoint. The same interface components find another use, this time for translation history.

Abstract: In the field of Big Translation History, (historical) book translation flows are studied based on publication metadata. This research data is often kept internally or only provided as domain-specific MARC21 records, a standard library format. Within the recently completed BELTRANS project, we created a large integrated data corpus of worldwide translations between Dutch and French between 1970 and 2020, where at least one Belgian was involved as author, scenarist, illustrator or editor, to study intra-belgian book translation flows, and published the corpus as FAIR data. In this paper we present the SAMPO-UI-based platform that can be used by non-technical users to explore the underlying BELTRANS Linked Data corpus. The off-the-shelf software SAMPO-UI was configured to build a user interface allowing the exploration of our data related to book publications, authors, publishers and linked temporal and geospatial information. The different search perspectives, filters and visualizations enable researchers to explore the corpus or download self-chosen subsets, without having to process the large underlying data dumps. Both the application and corpus data are opened up in a sustainable way, i.e. besides deposits at research repositories, the application is hosted in the long term at the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR) and the integrated data is equipped with provenance information allowing to click-through to the related metadata records at different national libraries. Future work can extend the application itself with novel visualization techniques or different download formats if necessary. Also, this application can serve as a role model to inspire other researchers to distribute their corpora as Linked Data and via such a SAMPO-UI platform.

The BELTRANS corpus and the portal configuration are available for reuse.