Towards Linked Vital Registration Data for Reconstituting Families and Creating Longitudinal Health Histories

The Irish Record Linkage 1864-1913 project aims to create a knowledge base containing historical birth-, marriageand death records encoded into RDF to reconstitute families and create longitudinal health histories. The goal is to interlink the different persons across these records as well as with supplementary datasets that provide additional context. With the help of knowledge engineers who will create the ontologies and set up the platform and the digital archivist who will curate, ingest and maintain the RDF, the historians will be able to analyse reconstructed “virtual” families of Dublin in the 19th and early 20th centuries, allowing them to address questions about the accuracy of officially reported maternal mortality and infant mortality rates. In the longer term, this platform will allow researchers to investigate how official historical datasets can contribute to modern-day epidemiological planning.