Sharing Data: The Case of Jewish Funerary Inscriptions Databases

This presentation will discuss our attempts to create a unified presentation of Jewish funerary inscriptions from two separate databases, "Inscriptions of Israel/Palestine (IIP) " and "epidat – Database of Jewish Epigraphy" (epidat). IIP collects inscriptions that date from the Persian Period through Late Antiquity and currently contains about 700 funerary inscriptions. The geographical focus of epidat is on Germany. The time span ranges from the 11th to the 20th century and covers medieval, early modern and modern period. The database currently contains about 32.000 inscriptions from 175 historic Jewish Cemeteries.

This presentation describes our attempts to link these two databases through a unified portal based on semantic web technologies.

Our goals are (1) to provide a model for thinking more generally about the value of linked open data; (2) to provide a method for and approach to linked open data; (3) the importance of authority files and thesauri to label research data and (4) to discuss the challenges inherent in our work.

We would like to provide open access to our research data both within the narrow field of Jewish epigraphy, and the broader fields of Jewish Studies and transdisciplinary cultural studies.