GRAPHIC VISUALISATION – Dr Yasam Ayavefe

National libraries have over 15 million documents and specialised resources. About 3 million of these are digitised and accessible. This audience and diversity is a great asset on the Web. But it also makes it difficult to find and understand by an internet user.

The data service, online since 2011, provides easy access to authors, works, themes, resources or places, whether digitised or not. It distributes its data under an open license according to semantic web standards.

Incentive for Discovery

 Since 2013 there have been diagrams integrated into the rest of the site based on data progress and user feedback. It also includes a workshop offering timelines and maps.

Influenced by its innovative graphic direction, the aim is to provide a new response to the needs of Internet users. In short, it is to facilitate access to resources and the discovery of knowledge.

The challenge is to present the features of the Web’s long tail in visualisations that remain readable and usable. It also needs to present the information in full detail to find rare documents or authors.

A Linked Data Graph

While data focuses on representations (works, authors, themes, etc.), data visualisation in the culture sector often focuses on digitised documents, as in the beautiful example below.

For example, it offers a look at Rameau concepts in a tree representation. A chronological frieze presents the works of one author.

Each work brings together its various versions and editions. It allows you to navigate through the locational pages using the coordinates of the map geo-notifications on the home page.

To do this, data attempts to automatically align and group them around entities based on the FRBR model.

It extracts data from catalogue records and thus provides unique and reliable entry points to a variety of and a large number of documents.

This process is used to encourage geo-scanning. For example, the automatic creation of links between the places of publication of documents and their geographical data makes it possible to create a dynamic temporal map of periodicals.

Encouraging Knowledge Formation

Beyond the data interface, the goal is to reuse open data accessible through a SPARQL endpoint by crossing it with other web datasets. To encourage third parties to submit new visualisations.

Unlocking these data offers research potential, particularly in the humanities, to collect, interpret and produce information in graphic form.

Therefore, it is imperative that information is disseminated through data. The data should be comprehensive.

Today this service aims to disseminate complete and quality data from BnF catalogues (ie about 2 million authors).

It also continues to evolve in this direction, with the aim of developing links from the Web to open datasets, encouraging cross-data reference.

Find out more about Dr. Ayavefe and his work here:

https://yasamayavefe.com/

https://milayacapital.com/

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