1. University Library / Theological Faculties
The Theological Subject Headings
Catalogue for Gender Studies
2012-12-26 Philipp Baar

2. Universitätsbibliothek Bochum
The catalogue
• The Theological Subject Headings Catalogue for Gender Studies is a
datasource, which focuses on Feminist Theology and Gender Studies.
• Articles, books and journals along with many online full-texts can be found
grouped under approx. 7.500 subject headings
• Currently we are working on making it searchable in Solr and making its
subject headings and bibliographic metadata available as Linked Open Data
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3. Universitätsbibliothek Bochum
The clean up
• There was an old version of the catalogue, containing much (16.000 titles),
but rather messy data
• We cleaned up, organizing the subject headings in 5 categories:
• Topics
• Temporals
• Geographicals
• Persons
• Scripture Citations
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4. Universitätsbibliothek Bochum
Organizing the subject headings
• For each category (except Persons) we built a thesaurus, organizing the
subject headings among each other and linked them to dbpedia
• Using SKOS as the main vocabulary for the topical subject headings, we got
resources looking like this:
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5. Universitätsbibliothek Bochum
Organizing the subject headings (topicals)
<http:://femtheol.ub.rub.de/thesaurus/topical/> a skos:Collection;
skos:member
<http://femtheol.ub.rub.de/thesuarus/homosexualitat>;
<http://femtheol.ub.rub.de/thesuarus/homosexualitat> a skos:Concept;
skos:inScheme <http://femtheol.ub.rub.de/thesaurus/>;
skos:prefLabel "Homosexualität"@de;
skos:broader
<http://femtheol.ub.rub.de/thesuarus/sexualitat>;
owl:sameAs <http://dbpedia.org/resource/Homosexuality>.
<http://femtheol.ub.rub.de/thesuarus/coming-out>
skos:related
<http://femtheol.ub.rub.de/thesuarus/homosexualitat>.
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6. Universitätsbibliothek Bochum
Mapping problems
• For the non-topical subject headings, SKOS was used for naming the
collections:
<http://femtheol.ub.rub.de/thesaurus/temporal/> a skos:Collection;
skos:member <http://femtheol.ub.rub.de/thesaurus/1989>
• We made the geographicals to a „skos:concept“ and a „skos:member“ of our
collection, then linked them to geonames (and dbpedia) with „owl:sameAs“,
planning to harvest information like „a is a city in country b“ automatically
• For building thesaurus structures with the temporals, we looked for alternative
ontologies, finally using cidoc-crm, getting resources like:
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7. Universitätsbibliothek Bochum
<http://femtheol.ub.rub.de/thesaurus/19-jahrhundert>
a skos:Concept;
a crm:E55_Type;
a crm:E4_Period;
skos:inScheme <http://femtheol.ub.rub.de/thesaurus/>;
skos:prefLabel "19. Jahrhundert"@de;
owl:sameAs <http://openlink.dbpedia.org/resource/19th_century>;
crm:P120i_occurs_after <http://femtheol.ub.rub.de/thesaurus/18-
jahrhundert>;
crm:P120_occurs_before <http://femtheol.ub.rub.de/thesaurus/20-
jahrhundert>.
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8. Universitätsbibliothek Bochum
The personal subject headings
• We further differentiated the personal subject headings in „real/historical“
persons and biblical persons (not implemented in the catalogue yet).
• So for each personal subject heading we had to note that the entity is a
person and for some that the person is a biblical figure.
• This time we used CRM again, plus the ontology of the German National
Library's linked data service, which provides the type „biblical person“ that just
has to be marked as a „crm:E55_Type“ and added to the person-attribute if
the subject heading names a biblical person:
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9. Universitätsbibliothek Bochum
The Personal subject headings
<http://d-nb.info/gnd/4006473-6/about/rdf>
a crm:E55_Type.
<http://femtheol.ub.rub.de/thesuarus/paulus>
a crm:E21_Person.
crm:P2_has_type <http://d-nb.info/gnd/4006473-
6/about/rdf>.
owl:sameAs
<http://dbpedia.org/resource/Paul_the_Apostle>.
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10. Universitätsbibliothek Bochum
The new version of the catalogue
• Currently, the catalogue contains about 800 titles, plus their subject headings
• We have not set up a triple store yet, neither have we implemented a
browsable thesaurus but we are working on having it ready by the end of the
year.
• Bibliographic metadata will be available as FRBRoo. We're working on that
too...
• Nevertheless we already now benefit from linked data:
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11. Universitätsbibliothek Bochum
The benefits
• The search engine can deal with queries in every language listed in the
respective dbpedia resource as „rdfs:label“, even things like “ チャーチ“
(„church”)
• The search engine expands queries containing keywords mentioned in the
„dbpedia-owl:abstract“
• A short demonstration →
http://femtheol.ub.rub.de/
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12. Universitätsbibliothek Bochum
Thanks for your attention!
For more information mail to: schlagwortkatalog@rub.de
Image on slide 9 by Dieter Schütz, pixelio.de
Image on slide 3 by w.r.wagner, pixelio.de Philipp Baar
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