CWD150

From Freebase

CWD150, Civil War Data 150, is a collaborative project to share Civil War related data in advance of the sesquicentennial of the beginning of the American Civil War in April of 2011. CWD150 is an offshoot of AMMP, and was designed together with the Archives of Michigan, to demonstrate a strong use case for Linked Data in the humanities. Our goal is to link civil war archives and data from separate state and national sources in an open community-maintained database (Freebase), and create interactive web applications to help link data together across collections. For instance, link soldier portraits on Flickr with soldier names in the NPS Soldier and Sailor System, state regiment flags with regiments, soldiers’ manuscripts with soldier names, or battlefield photos with geotags. These links will enable unique presentation and discovery never before possible with Civil War data.

For More Information

• Civil War Data 150 website
• Exploring The Use of Linked Data to Bridge State and Federal Archives Webcast of presentation to San Jose State University School of Library and Information Sciences program about CWD150.

Spreadsheet of Data Sources

• Google spreadsheet with sources by priority Maintained by Jon Voss.

Possible Demo Apps to Assist Indexing

• We plan to use RABJ based apps to assist with indexing.
• In order to assign regiments (~4k) to the Union or Confederate armies, create an app that will show regiment name and description, user just checks Union, Confederate, or Skip.
• To index information from Flickr photo descriptions, app will show photo with description and have boxes to fill in Name, Regiment, Location, etc. These will require identifiers with the exception of name. See the Dater App (app and code)

Possible Demo Apps for Data Mashups

• Idea: If I lived in $town in 1861, I might've joined the $regiment, fought in $battle..., and would have had a $casualties/#regiment % chance of living through the Civil War. Based on the regiment, may display photos or regimental flags.
• Idea: (flash or Simile) Choose a regiment to see the animated timeline of the regiment's journey through the civil war on a map, with battles and casualties, photos and correspondence.

Some other ideas for Demo Apps:

• http://conflicthistory.com/
• http://simile.mit.edu/
• http://metadata.berkeley.edu/demos/

Schema

See: Military Commons

Classes of things to consider:

• Soldiers - Military Person
• 400 Battles - Military Conflict
• 4000 Regiments - Military unit
• Divisions (Civil War regiments broken down into 10 divisions of about 100 men)
• Casualties
  • Aggregated casualties incurred in conflict can be noted using Casualties
  • Aggregated casualties can't be linked to the date in a multi-day battle on which they occurred. e.g. (1000 dead first day, 2000 dead second day, 300 dead third day etc..)
  • No current way to link an individual to the military conflict in which they died. (Except implicitly using date of death and place of death in deceased person)
  • No current way to note attrition of military units (through disease, starvation, desertion or retirement) outside of a military conflict.
• Flags - Flag (base type, not in commons)
• Towns/locations/battlefields Location

Schema notes:

• Military unit needs more properties: geographic location where it was formed, members (i.e. people), commanders, involvement in conflicts, etc. This needs to include both militias and "regular" army.
• Relationship schema? - Relationship Vocabulary or FOAF
• Correspondence schema?
• Recruitment schema?