Emblematica Online allows humanities scholars to seamlessly discover and link to items in a unique virtual emblem corpus distributed across six institutions in the US and Europe. The site supports multi-granular discovery of 1,400+ digitized emblem books and 25,000+ individual emblems from selective emblem books. To better integrate with related digital images and textual resources elsewhere, and to provide additional context for users, the site exploits linked open data (LOD) in two ways. First, as a producer of LOD, it publishes emblem and emblem book metadata as HTML+RDFa with schema.org semantics, making emblem resources more visible and useful in a linked open data context. Second, as a consumer of LOD, it enhances user experiences by utilizing LOD services and resources. For example, using the Iconclass LOD service, Emblematica Online supports multi-lingual browsing of the Iconclass vocabulary and connects users to digital sources elsewhere that share Iconclass descriptors. Also, it provides additional context about authors and contributors, including gender, nationality, and occupation, by reconciling names appearing in emblem metadata with LOD sources, such as the VIAF, DNB, and Wikipedia. This presentation discusses how Emblematica Online publishes its metadata as LOD and improves user experience using LOD sources as well as Emblem ontology development and plans for new services that allow possible reuse of Emblem LOD. |