Explorations of Art Market Networks as LOD

Linked Jazz Triple Builder: a start for Goepel

In an earlier post, we explored the Nazi era art market network formed by Göpel (Goepel), Wuester, Holzapfel, Lefranc, Mandl, Birtschansky and Bloch. Is it possible to express their relationships and actions as linked open data?

How to formalize the relationships between these art market professionals and opportunists?

Does it make sense to approach the representation of this network as a kind of prosopography?


Wikipedia defines prosopography as:

 an investigation of the common characteristics of a historical group, whose individual biographies may be largely untraceable, by means of a collective study of their lives, in multiple career-line analysis.[1] Prosopographical research has the goal of learning about patterns of relationships and activities through the study of collective biography...

 A propopography aims to gather in one place every mention of a given individual and all the people he (rarely she) had relations with - a potentially illuminating approach for the study of art market networks.

Scholars of the ancient world have long experience with the prosopographical approach, and in recent years have pioneered attempts to express relationships as linked data. (see for example Current Practice in Linked Open Data for the Ancient World 2014 or  The AWOL Index)

Can this experience guide us as we attempt to code intelligence on the transatlantic art market as linked open data?

What would a prosopographical index of, for example, Erhard Goepel aka Erhard Göpel look like, expressed as linked open data? What URIs would one need to identify the people, places, events and relationships described in publicly available documents? How could one knit them together? Publish them? Integrate them into the LOD cloud?

Is it possible, using nothing more than machine readable codes, to tell his story?