Historical Data Preservation and Interpretation Pipeline for Irish Civil Registration Records

Semantic Web technologies give us the opportunity to understand todays data-rich society and provide novel means to explore our past. Civil registration records such as birth, death, and marriage registers contain a vast amount of implicit information which can be revealed by structuring, linking and combining that information with other datasets and bodies of knowledge. In the Irish Record Linkage (IRL) Project 1864-1913, we have developed a data preservation and interpretation pipeline supported by a dedicated semantic architecture. This three-layered pipeline is designed to capture separate concerns from the perspective of multiple disciplines such as archival studies, history and data science. In this study, our aim is to demonstrate best practices in digital archives, while facilitating innovative new methodologies in historical research. The designed pipeline is executed with a dataset of 4090 registered Irish death entries from selected areas of south Dublin City.