Tolkien Linked Open Data Project

Linking Secondary Material

One of our goals is to facilitate the linking of secondary material such as art, music, blogs, podcasts, articles, and books to the primary material of Tolkien’s works.

For example, if you have a piece of art or podcast episode about a particular character or passage in Tolkien’s works, we would like to link your content to the relevant entities in the Tolkien linked data graph.

Our vision is that someone could look up a particular passage or character or location in Tolkien’s works and see a list of secondary material that references it.

One of the advantages of Linked Open Data is this linking doesn’t need to be done in a centralized way. As we develop identifiers and guidelines for linking, you can incorporate these into your own projects and we can link to you from ours. We envisage that communities around content creators may collaborate on the annotation necessary to incorporate the content into the graph.

If you are interested in working with us in an experimental way, we particularly want to work with the creators of the following types of content as well as people who have experience with relevant metadata and linked data:

  • Artwork
  • Music
  • Blogs
  • Podcasts
  • YouTube
  • Journal Articles
  • Monographs

This will involve assigning identifiers to the content, adding appropriate metadata, and then linking to the relevant entities in the Tolkien linked data graph.

While artwork may just reference a single passage, something like a monograph may have hundreds of references to Tolkien’s text and we would love to tie those references to our citation system to enable people to find parts of your work relevant to certain passages.

To get involved, please contact James Tauber at jtauber@jtauber.com or say hi on our Discord server.