An Interactive 3D Visualization of RDF-based Digital Editions

This paper suggests an interactive web-based tool for 3D visualization of information graphs, particularly RDF graphs

From the Mechanics of Jacob Bernoulli to Digital History of Science. Infrastructure, Tools, and Methods

The objective of this thesis is to promote the employment of Linked Open Data practices in the creation and presentation of digital editions of written historical sources, to offer tools for facilitating research, and to suggest a new research method based on the Linked Data representation of digital editions. Even though the current thesis mainly focuses on proposing a digital approach to research in the field of history of science, the discussed concepts and tools, and the new method are applicable to any humanities field. In order to understand the needs of the field of history of science and to develop tools with practical use in research, I chose to study the contributions of Jacob Bernoulli (1654–1705) to rational mechanics, a topic that has not been previously studied. The first part of this thesis is dedicated to the study of Bernoulli’s works on mechanics mainly focusing on his analyses of the Funicularia problem, elasticity, theory of neutral axis, and parallelogram of forces. This research is based on an in-depth study of Bernoulli’s mechanics through published articles, correspondences, and private notes. The second part of this thesis describes the process of creating digital editions of these types of historical data using semantic web technologies, their integration into a virtual research environment (VRE) called the Bernoulli Euler Online (BEOL) platform, and the tools offered to study the generated network of resources. This thesis illustrates the representation of the scientific-historical data as a network of resources on the web and describes the advanced research tools that allow for powerful analysis of the RDF data graphs. Since natural philosophers of the early modern period communicated ideas through correspondence creating what is known today as the republic of letters, the digital edition of their correspondence available on different online portals must also be connected to create a virtual republic of letters. This thesis explains a generic e-infrastructure that I have developed to connect the digital editions of other natural philosophers’ correspondence presented on external platforms, such as The Newton Project and the Briefportal Leibniz, to the BEOL platform without centralizing data silos. This infrastructure enables researchers to access and analyze the entire correspondence network through one central platform. This thesis thus suggests a new research method for the history of the science field — the network method — that is based on the network representation of research data. Lastly, this thesis suggests a new technique to visualize RDF-based data as web-based interactive 3D graphs that can be used for any humanities data. The purpose of this tool is to strengthen the suggested network method by giving a real picture of the relational structure of data and allowing researchers to interact with a 3D model of the network resources

e-Version of the Republic of Letters

This paper presents a novel approach to create an RDF based e-version of the correspondence network by connecting author-centric digital editions platforms without centeralizing data silos. Through one single platform that presents the network, researchers can perform advanced metadata and asynchronous full-text queries over the entire network to find resources for their research inventory and directly access the data. The advanced search tools of the platform, allow researchers to channel their expertise into the analysis of the resources and their relations rather than a quest for them. Based on this work, this paper introduces a new research method, The Network Method, to study the historical data as a graph. It also argues that visualization of the RDF based network of correspondence as web-based interactive 3D force-directed graphs empowers relational thinking by depicting the connections between resources and drawing the researcher's attention to the connection between the atoms of knowledge, data distribution, irregularities, etc. Furthermore, this paper presents a new feature that adds the time-dimension to the visualization of the correspondence data which enables researchers to study the change in the topic of correspondence over time

Jacob Bernoulli's analyses of the Funicularia problem

Jacob Bernoulli's entries about mechanics in his scientific notebook, the 'Meditationes', reveal new facts about the history of the catenary curve. Bernoulli's analyses show that the catenaria, velaria, lintearia and elastica curves together form a family of curves, which I will refer to as the funicularia family. Attending to the history of the whole family of these curves provides remarkable insights into the origin of the catenary problem and the process of its discovery. Studying the 'Meditationes' together with Bernoulli's correspondence and publications shows how analysis of one curve led him to the discovery of the others. As a result, this study shows that - although Leonhard Euler is known to be the one who unified the catenary problem and the elastica problem in 1728 - Jacob Bernoulli had in fact proven the same more than thirty years earlier, providing in his notebook a general differential equation for this family of curves. Furthermore, I demonstrate Jacob Bernoulli's priority over his brother Johann in finding the velaria curve

JourneyStar: A Generic RDF-star-based Ontology for Travel Data Representation

This research paper introduces RDF-star technology as a solution to the limitations of standard RDF in representing and querying metadata-oriented travel accounts, especially historical ones. By enabling statements about statements and directly embedding metadata within RDF triples, RDF-star enhances query efficiency and simplifies data modeling, offering a more streamlined approach to constructing complex knowledge graphs. This paper introduces the RDF-star-based JourneyStar ontology, explicitly designed for representing travel data and metadata. Through examples, we demonstrate the application of this ontology in constructing a knowledge graph representing journeys outlined in Jacob I Bernoulli’s travel diary, Reisbüchlein

An Interactive, Multi-layer Edition Of Jacob Bernoulli's Scientific Notebook Meditationes As Part Of Bernoulli-Euler Online

Abstract of paper 0115 presented at the Digital Humanities Conference 2019 (DH2019), Utrecht , the Netherlands 9-12 July, 2019