The Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland (VRTI) has passed a major milestone, with its latest release bringing the total number of records freely and permanently available on the platform to more than half a million.
Supporting how users explore those collections is the Knowledge Graph for Irish History, developed through a collaboration between historians on the VRTI project and computer scientists Professor Declan O'Sullivan, Dr Alex Randles and Dr Lucy McKenna from Trinity College Dublin's School of Computer Science and Statistics (SCSS) and the ADAPT Research Ireland Centre.
This year's release adds almost 194,000 historical records, spanning material from medieval poachers and a 1692 tax on potatoes to women's opposition to Catholic Emancipation and Irish support for the American Revolution. Alongside the growth in the archive, the Knowledge Graph continues to expand, enabling users to move between related people, places, events and records rather than searching individual collections in isolation.
The latest release adds more than 5,800 historical individuals to the Knowledge Graph, including over 2,300 women from the early modern period (1550–1700) and more than 2,300 individuals from the medieval and Norman period, drawn from the VOICES, NAISC and Dictionary of Irish Biography projects. The Knowledge Graph now includes information on more than 15,000 historical people connected through approximately 3.5 million linked historical facts.
A new Showcase feature also launches with this release, allowing historians to curate and share themed collections of people and events within the Knowledge Graph. The feature offers a more guided way to explore particular historical periods, topics or communities and demonstrates how the Knowledge Graph can support new approaches to presenting and navigating historical research.
Professor Declan O'Sullivan, from the School of Computer Science and Statistics and the ADAPT Research Ireland Centre, said:
"The VRTI Knowledge Graph for Irish History is a ground-breaking digital resource connecting thousands of historical sources and records to create one of the most richly linked resources for Irish history ever assembled.
"In the past year, the Graph has grown by nearly six thousand people through collaboration with the VOICES and NAISC projects. Especially exciting is the addition of more than 2,300 early modern women, dramatically expanding the representation of women in Ireland's digital historical record, and the inclusion of more than 2,500 events associated with them.
"This year we are also pleased to introduce a new 'Showcase' feature, which allows historians to directly curate and make available a set of Knowledge Graph people and events on a particular theme.
"The expansion and enhancement of the Knowledge Graph marks an important step in making Irish history more connected, searchable and accessible. It gives researchers, students and the wider public new ways to discover the people and places of Ireland's past, and to follow the links between individual lives and the records that survive today."
The Knowledge Graph reflects sustained research in knowledge graphs, linked data and semantic web technologies within SCSS and ADAPT. It provides the semantic infrastructure that supports exploration across the VRTI collections, demonstrating how computer science research can contribute to new ways of accessing and understanding Ireland's documentary heritage.
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