![\"Painting](\"https:\/\/cdrhdev.unl.edu\/log\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/key_portrait.jpg\")
A slave owner who represented slaves in court. He is probably better known for penning the words now used in the Star Spangled Banner<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
<\/p>\n
O Say Can You See: Early Washington, D.C., Law & Family<\/h2>\n
The O Say Can You See (OSCYS) project explores relationships between individuals involved in legal proceedings in Washington, D.C. from 1800 to 1862. Legal documents like summonses, minute books, verdicts, and depositions were located, digitized, and marked up. From those documents, relationships between individuals were gathered, described in a TTL file, and defined in an OWL file.<\/p>\n
We use SPARQL on the TTL and OWL files to power a few features that show up for each person in OSCYS. On an individual\u2019s page, we list all of their immediate relationships and link to that person\u2019s network visualization. The visualization has not only links to other people, but the type of link. If you are less interested in a specific person and more interested in a general type of relationship, then head to the \u201cpeople\u201d page where the types of connections (spouse of, attorney for, etc) between all the individuals in OSCYS are browsable. Additionally, there is a search feature that allows you to look at how many ways the attorneys are related. All of this information is being powered by RDF. I\u2019ve explained the queries that I used to get the information below, if you would like to jump straight to the explanations. However, a little background information about how our metadata expert, Laura Weakly, encoded the relationships is probably the best place to start!<\/p>\n
- \n
- Background: OWL and TTL<\/a><\/li>\n
- Direct Connections<\/a><\/li>\n
- Network Visualization<\/a><\/li>\n
- Connection Types<\/a><\/li>\n
- Attorney Search<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Background<\/h2>\n
Much of the information about each person is described in a TEI file (available here: caution, large file<\/a>). However, information specific to the relationships between individuals are stored in a turtle file<\/a> with this type of setup:<\/p>\n
\nperson 1 > attorney of > person 2\r\nperson 2 > client of > person 1\r\n<\/code><\/pre>\n<\/div>\nMore information about each relationship is stored in the OWL file<\/a>. The owl file says:<\/p>\n
\nattorney of > inverse of > client of\r\nattorney of > type > legal relationship\r\nclient of > inverse of > attorney of\r\nclient of > type > legal relationship\r\n<\/code><\/pre>\n<\/div>\nUsing a combination of the two documents, we can now start to answer some questions.<\/p>\n
- \n
- Who is a given person related to?<\/li>\n
- Who is related to someone who is related to a given person?<\/li>\n
- Which people have any type of family relationships?<\/li>\n
- Which people are the attorneys of someone else?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
This is what a typical query setup looks like for OSCYS:<\/p>\n
\nPREFIX osrdf: <http:\/\/earlywashingtondc.org\/rdf\/oscys.relationships#>\r\nPREFIX oscys: <http:\/\/earlywashingtondc.org\/rdf\/oscys.objectproperties.owl#>\r\n\r\nSELECT *\r\nFROM <http:\/\/earlywashingtondc.org\/rdf\/oscys.relationships.ttl>\r\nWHERE {\r\n \/\/ query goes here\r\n}<\/code><\/pre>\n<\/figure>\nThis should look mostly familiar, if you were following along at home with part II, except for the PREFIX declarations at the top. The prefix is a tool to make things more human readable. It\u2019s much nicer to get a result that says
osrdf:per.000001<\/code> rather than one that says<http:\/\/earlywashingtondc.org\/rdf\/oscys.relationships#per.000001><\/code>.<\/p>\nIf you want to try any of these queries on your own, feel free to visit the sparqler<\/a> and paste these queries in (ignore the target graph URI field). Except in a few cases, the above generic setup should be sufficient if you simply paste in the \u201cWHERE\u201d portion of the query.<\/p>\n
![\"Somewhat](\"https:\/\/cdrhdev.unl.edu\/log\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/network_rollover_1.png\")
Now we can create cool stuff like this visualization! Karin made art for the home page of OSCYS with real data from the project.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n Direct Connections<\/h2>\n
Alright, let\u2019s take a look at probably the simplest SPARQL query behind the scenes of the OSCYS site. Each person\u2019s page has a list of their immediate relationships which is drawn from the TTL. Francis Scott Key\u2019s page<\/a> looks something like this:<\/p>\n
\n![\"F.S.](\"https:\/\/cdrhdev.unl.edu\/log\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/immediate_relationships.jpg\")
Francis did a lot of attorneying, so it would have taken a much larger screenshot to get past “Attorney Against” to the miles of “Attorney For”s.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n This is the query used to generate the list on Francis Scott Key\u2019s page<\/a>.<\/p>\n
\nPREFIX osrdf: <http:\/\/earlywashingtondc.org\/rdf\/oscys.relationships#>\r\nPREFIX oscys: <http:\/\/earlywashingtondc.org\/rdf\/oscys.objectproperties.owl#>\r\n\r\nSELECT *\r\nFROM <http:\/\/earlywashingtondc.org\/rdf\/oscys.relationships.ttl>\r\nWHERE {\r\n osrdf:per.000001 ?rel1 ?per1 .\r\n ?per1 oscys:fullName ?name1\r\n}\r\nORDER BY ?rel1 ?name1<\/code><\/pre>\n<\/figure>\nThis will return results look something like the following, but in json, which is then manipulated into HTML.<\/p>\n
- Direct Connections<\/a><\/li>\n
![\"Francis](\"https:\/\/cdrhdev.unl.edu\/log\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/key_flag.jpg\")
![\"Visualization](\"https:\/\/cdrhdev.unl.edu\/log\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/mary_bell.jpg\")
![\"Visualization](\"https:\/\/cdrhdev.unl.edu\/log\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/key_overwhelming.jpg\")
![\"Part](\"https:\/\/cdrhdev.unl.edu\/log\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/bell_family.jpg\")
![\"People](\"https:\/\/cdrhdev.unl.edu\/log\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/deposed_by.jpg\")
![\"Elias](\"https:\/\/cdrhdev.unl.edu\/log\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/caldwell.jpg\")
![\"Immediately](\"https:\/\/cdrhdev.unl.edu\/log\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/elias_caldwell.jpg\")
![\"Salvador](\"https:\/\/cdrhdev.unl.edu\/log\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/The_Persistence_of_Memory.jpg\")
![\"John](\"https:\/\/cdrhdev.unl.edu\/log\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/calhoun.jpg\")
![\"Visualization](\"https:\/\/cdrhdev.unl.edu\/log\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/family.jpg\")