O Say Can You See: Early Washington, D.C., Law & Family

Data Download / Query

Relationship description file (.ttl) Relationship ontology file (.owl) Raw relationships data with case sources (.csv) TEI Personography (GitHub) Browse TEI files with person, case, and document information (GitHub)

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Relationship Querying

The relationships between individuals involved with the cases in the OSCYS project have been described with Resource Description Framework (RDF). The relationships themselves are available in the relationships.ttl file, above, and the definitions of the types of relationships are in ontology.owl file. The RDF was generated from a CSV file, which contains citations for the cases from which the relationships were defined.

Simple Relationship API

All of the /people/id and /people/network/id pages use RDF queries to obtain relationships between individuals. Adding a ".xml" or ".json" extension makes the raw response from the SPARQL query available. Here are some examples:

Example of JSON results for Francis Scott Key immediate relationships Example of XML results for Francis Scott Key immediate relationships Example of JSON results for Francis Scott Key relationships (two degrees separation)

Additionally, on the "search by relationship type" page at /people/connection_type, the XML and JSON results are available.

Example of JSON results for 'witness of' relationship Example of XML results for 'witness of' relationship

Getting Started with RDF

Not sure where to begin? An intro to RDF and some of the queries used to power the OSCYS site are available online. Check out these tutorials from UNL's Center for Digital Research in the Humanities: