How the Sloane Lab, a collaboration between major universities and museums, unified its massive historical and archival collection using knowledge graphs with metaphactory

Bridging the past and present: Unifying the Sloane Collection with knowledge graphs

About the Sloane Lab

Sloane Lab is a research project funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) as part of the “Towards a National Collection” program. The initiative explores technologies and methodologies for creating a unified national collection for the UK, ensuring that historical archives and artifacts are accessible and comprehensively documented. The project is a collaboration between University College London (UCL), Technische Universität Darmstadt (TU Darmstadt), the British Museum and the Natural History Museum London, with additional involvement from the British Library. The project was led by Prof. Dr. Julianne Nyhan, Professor of Humanities Data Science and Methodology at TU Darmstadt and Emeritus Professor of Digital Humanities at UCL. Dr. Andreas Vlachidis, Associate Professor of Information Science at UCL and whom we spoke to about the project, acted as project Co-Investigator and Technical Lead.

The challenge: Reconnecting a fragmented collection

The Sloane Collection, originally compiled by Sir Hans Sloane in the 18th century via a network of traders, donors and enslaved individuals, is a vast and meticulously cataloged collection comprising 50,000 books and manuscripts, hundreds of thousands of natural history specimens, hundreds of paintings and albums of prints and drawings, and thousands of ethnographic objects and antiquities. The collection was initially housed by the British Museum, but as the museum expanded over time, items from this collection were distributed across multiple institutions, including the Natural History Museum and the British Library. Each institution adopted distinct systems for managing metadata, leading to significant fragmentation of the collection and making it difficult for researchers to ask questions across the collection as a whole.

In a digitally reunified form, the Sloane Collection could better support research into the legacies of transatlantic enslavement, empire and colonialism and heritage collections. The Sloane Lab project aimed at bringing together historical and present-day information that describes the Sloane Collection and making this information available for exploration. Therefore, the primary challenge that the project was looking to tackle was the aggregation and unification of the collection’s metadata by integrating data from original manuscripts (digitized and transcribed catalogs) with modern museum catalogue systems while maintaining historical authenticity. Additionally, the project sought to address gaps within the historical records – such as the limited representation of women, enslaved people and indigenous communities – by developing a model capable of capturing such absences.

The solution: A knowledge graph for seamless integration and discovery

From the outset, the project adopted a knowledge graph approach to seamlessly integrate data into a unified Sloane Lab Knowledge Base and semantically enrich it. Beyond this, the project consortium envisioned an intuitive application that would empower non-expert technical users to engage with the compiled knowledge base. The goal was to transform exploration into an intuitive and dynamic experience, enabling users to uncover connections and make discoveries with ease.

To achieve this, Sloane Lab leveraged Ontotext GraphDB as its triple store and developed an ontology based on CIDOC CRM, extending it to model the semantics of absences within the collection. This ontology was then ingested into metaphactory, where it served as the foundation for an interactive application designed to facilitate querying, exploration and visualization of the knowledge base in a user-friendly and insightful manner.

Why metaphactory: Enabling intuitive knowledge exploration and discovery

In selecting a platform for making the Sloane Lab Knowledge Base accessible, the goal was to ensure that the knowledge graph was not only a powerful data integration tool but also an accessible and intuitive resource for both researchers and non-technical users. metaphactory was chosen for its ability to bridge the gap between complex semantic technologies and user-friendly interaction, offering:

• A user-friendly search, discovery and exploration interface that makes the knowledge graph easily accessible to researchers and non-technical users alike.

• A model-driven app building approach and template framework that simplifies the creation of custom views and interfaces, enabling flexible application development on top of the knowledge graph.

• Comprehensive querying and visualization capabilities that provide rich insights and intuitive exploration over an extensive information layer.

metaphactory-powered visualizations from the Sloane Lab Knowledge Base

Notably, the application building was conducted entirely by the Sloane Lab project team led by Dr. Andreas Vlachidis, demonstrating the ease of use and adaptability of metaphactory. "metaphactory enabled our team to rapidly build an intuitive and flexible application on top of the knowledge graph without requiring extensive front-end development. Its model-driven approach allowed us to focus on enriching and structuring the knowledge base, while its powerful visualization and search capabilities made the collection accessible to a much broader audience," commented Vlachidis.

Key benefits: Transforming metadata into meaningful insights

The Sloane Lab Knowledge Base transforms the way the Sloane Collection is explored and understood by unifying fragmented metadata, enhancing accessibility, preserving historical integrity and establishing a scalable foundation for future expansion. Specifically, it delivers concrete benefits such as:

• Unified collection view: The project successfully aggregated and connected disparate metadata from multiple institutions, bridging historical and contemporary information describing the Sloane Collection.

• Enhanced accessibility: By using metaphactory, researchers and historians gained an intuitive and interactive platform for exploring the knowledge graph, reducing reliance on technical expertise.

• Historical integrity & insights: The ontology captured the original composition of the collection, while also addressing historical biases and absences, enriching the understanding of its provenance.

• Rapid application building: metaphactory’s flexible model-driven app building and templating framework allowed the team to easily create customized views and interfaces tailored to the project’s needs.

• Scalability & future-proofing: The knowledge graph infrastructure established a scalable foundation for future expansions, enabling integration with additional datasets and institutions.

Through the innovative use of knowledge graph technology and metaphactory’s intuitive knowledge discovery interfaces and app building framework, the Sloane Lab project demonstrated how digital tools can reconnect fragmented historical collections, offering scholars and the public a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of history.

Explore the Sloane Lab Knowledge Base

The Sloane Lab Knowledge Base provides an interactive platform for discovering and exploring the historical and current artifacts and records of the Sloane Collection. To browse interconnected data, visualize relationships and gain deeper insights into the collection’s history, start exploring here!