BELTRANS data model specification

The project Intra-Belgian literary translations since 1970 (BELTRANS) studies the untold history of literary translation flows in Belgium between French and Dutch in the period 1970-2020.

As part of the research activities, a corpus of bibliographic and authority metadata was created based on various data sources. For semantic interoperability we used the Resource Description Framework (RDF) to integrate the data.

In essence, we use concepts of the W3C Provenance Ontology (PROV-O) as basis and reuse as much as possible RDF terms from the common schema.org vocabulary and other more specialized vocabularies such as from the Bibframe ontology. Where necessary we defined our own terms.

This document specifies the used RDF terms and provides examples around the different key concepts

• Translations
• Contributors
• Locations
• Originals
• Works

as well as how these terms were serialized in one or more RDF named-graphs.

Throughout the document, the following terminology is used (sorted alphabetically).

Belgian Bibliography

The Belgian Bibliography exists since 1875 and published online since 1998. It consists of all publications published in Belgium or publications by Belgian authors who are domiciled in Belgium published abroad. The bibliography currenclty consists of ten main categories like 200 Theology. Religions. or 800 Literature. History and literary criticism.

BELTRANS genres

These genres from the Belgian Bibliography are the main focus of the BELTRANS PhD students. Genres with the following prefix are included: 81, 83, 84, 85, 86, 900, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97. Thus for instance 810 Poetry. or 850 Comics..

Correlation list

A spreadsheet in which a human validator specifies one entity per row and indicates local identifiers of this entity in different columns. I.e. the human validator correlates the different local records by aligning their identifiers in a single row.

Contributor

A person or organization that contributed to the creation of a translation or an original. We use MARC relator codes to indicate the role that a contributor had in the creation. See also nationality filter that was performed with the help of assigned roles.

In-house translation

A specific type of Translation that was created by an often unknown Translator internal to the publishing process (e.g. an employee of an organizational Publisher).

Literal value

According to the definition in the RDF standard, a literal is used for values such as strings, numbers and dates. It is thus not a URI. Examples are "Brussels", "42" or "2024-01-01". It can be a language-tagged string like "Brussels"@en or "Bruxelles"@fr or be described with a data type like "2024-01-01"^^xsd:date

Named-Graph

The context URI of an RDF triple, i.e. a fourth component which makes an RDF triple an RDF quad. Among others, this allows to select several RDF triples with the same context URI, thus "within the same named graph".

Nationality filter

Within BELTRANS we are interested in translations where Belgian's were involved. The nationality filter applies if contributors of one of the following MARC roles are identified to be Belgians (the MARC code is provided in brackets): authors (aut), scenarists (sce), illustrators (ill) or publishing directors (pbd)

Original

A book that was published by a Publisher in a specific Source Language and that was not published before in other languages.

PROV agent

According to PROV-DM, an agent is something that bears some form of responsibility for an activity taking place, for the existence of an entity, o rfor another agent's activity.

PROV activity

According to PROV-DM, an activity is something that occurs over a period of time and acts upon or with entities; it may include consuming, processing, transforming, modifying, relocating, using, or generating entities.

PROV entity

According to PROV-DM, an entity is a physical, digital, conceptual, or other kind of thing with some fixed aspects; entities may be real or imaginary.

Publisher

An organization or an individual that makes information or other forms of creative works available to the public for sale or free of charge, i.e. an organization or an individual that publishes information or other forms of creative works.

RDF Triple

A statement with a subject, predicate and object, where the subject and predicate are Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) and the object can be a URI or a Literal value. See ...

RDF Quad

A statement with a context, subject, predicate and object, where the context, subject and predicate are Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) and the object can be a URI or a Literal value. In the following example, the definition of two books is in the named graph ex:kbr, whereas additional location information is in the named graph ex:geo.

ex:book1 a schema:CreativeWork ex:kbr .
ex:book2 a schema:CreativeWork ex:kbr .
ex:book1 schema:locationCreated ex:brussels ex:geo .
ex:brussels a schema:Place ex:geo .

RML

The RDF Mapping Language (RML) is a mapping language defined to express customized mapping rules from heterogeneous data structures and serializations to the RDF data model.

Source Language

The language a book was originally published in, i.e. the language of an Original.

Target Language

The language of a published book that was translated by a Translator from a Source Language, i.e. the language of a Translation.

Translation

A book that was published by a Publisher and that is the result of a translation activity, i.e. a known/unknown Translator was responsible to translate the Original book from a Source Language to a Target Language.

Translator

Someone who translates a (published) book from a Source Language to a Target Language, usually a person. This person might be known or unknown, the latter is often the case for In-house translations where no translator is indicated in the published book or the book metadata.

UUID

A Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) is a number of 32 hexadecimal digits that is basically unique. An example is ea8c2233-8694-4e13-998a-c3592eddad5f. The first block consists of random digits, the second block is based on the timestamp, the third block starts with 4, indicating that this is a UUID of version 4, the fourth block are clock sequence bits, and the last block is random again (as this is version 4, in other versions the last block is based on the MAC address of the machine that generated the UUID).

alternate name

Authorities (such as persons or organizations) may have several spellings. Next to the preferred-name spelling, alternate names record other possible spellings. This makes them useful for Information Retrieval.

authority

This term from Information science, often used in the library domain, specifies a record within a controlled vocabulary. Specifically it covers "authorized forms of names, subjects and subject subdivisions" [MARC21Aut]. Historically used as a uniform way to spell something and hence a form of identifier.

data minimization

This is a global principle about processing only the necessary amount of personal data. Within Europe it is a fundamental privacy principle as part of the General Data Protection Regulation ([GDPR]).

data-subject

According to the GDPR: ...

entity

Todo: definition of an entity

ISNI

The International Standard Name Identifier (ISO 27729) is used to uniquely identify persons and organisations involved in the creation, production, management and distribution of cultural content. ISNI is a unique and permanent 16-digit number. KBR, the main coordinating partner of MetaBelgica is ISNI registration agency and is empowered to assign new ISNI identifiers.

OWA

The Open World Assumption (OWA) specifies that ...

property

Todo: definition of a property

property instance

The usage of a property on an entity, i.e. the value of the property. If John is a person entity, Ghent a city entity and place of birth a property. Then the statement that John was born in Ghent is the property instance.

preferred-name

Authorities (such as persons or organizations) may have several spellings. Next to zero or more alternate names, preferred-names are the historically uniform way to denote the name in authority control. For modern web-based systems, a single preferred name (per language) can also serve as "the" label of a record.

This sections provides an overview of a translation and furthermore focuses on the following different aspects and links to other concepts: activities, contributors, originals and locations.

#
# A book linking to different instances of bf:Identifier
# as well as a direct link to an ISBN-10
#
ex:book a schema:CreativeWork ;
        dcterms:identifier "ea8c2233-8694-4e13-998a-c3592eddad5f" ;
        bibo:isbn10 "..." ;
        bf:identifiedBy ex:bookKBR ;
        bf:identifiedBy ex:bookKB ;
        bf:identifiedBy ex:bookBnF ;
        bf:identifiedBy ex:bookUnesco ;
        bf:identifiedBy ex:bookISBN10 .

ex:bookKBR a bf:Identifier ;
           rdfs:label "KBR" ;
           rdf:value "..." .

ex:bookBnF a bf:Identifier ;
           rdfs:label "BnF" ; 
           rdf:value "..." .

ex:bookUnesco a bf:Identifier ;
              rdfs:label "Unesco" ;
              rdf:value "..." .

ex:bookISBN10 a bf:Identifier ;
              rdfs:label "ISBN-10" ;
              rdf:value "..." .

#
# Definition of a translation with direct links to contributor with role-specific attributes
#
ex:book a schema:CreativeWork ;
        prov:wasGeneratedBy ex:bookTranslationActivity ;
        schema:author ex:person1 ;
        marcrel:aut ex:person1 ;
        marcrel:ill ex:person2 .

#
# The translation activity linking to one association per contributor
#
ex:bookTranslationActivity a prov:Activity ;
                           prov:generated ex:book ;
                           prov:qualifiedAssociation ex:bookPerson1Assoc ;
                           prov:qualifiedAssociation ex:bookPerson2Assoc .

#
# Associations indicating in which role a contributor contributed to an activity
#
ex:bookPerson1Assoc a prov:Association ;
                    prov:hadRole btid:role_aut ;
                    prov:activity ex:bookTranslationActivity .

ex:bookPerson2Assoc a prov:Association ;
                    prov:hadRole btid:role_ill ;
                    prov:activity ex:bookTranslationActivity .

During the project we used several named-graphs to store the data. However, this makes SPARQL queries more complex and hence we also provide a serialization in a single graph for easier accessibility.