DDB-KG: The German Bibliographic Heritage in a Knowledge Graph

Under the German government’s initiative “NEUSTART Kultur”, the German Digital Library or Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (DDB) is undergoing improvements to enhance user-experience. As an initial step, emphasis is placed on creating a knowledge graph from the bibliographic record collection of the DDB.
This paper discusses the challenges facing the DDB in terms of retrieval and the solutions in addressing them. In particular, limitations of the current data model or ontology to represent bibliographic metadata is analyzed through concrete examples. This study presents the complete ontological mapping from DDB-Europeana Data Model (DDB-EDM) to FaBiO, and a prototype of the DDB-KG made available as a SPARQL endpoint. The suitabiliy of the target ontology is demonstrated with SPARQL queries formulated from competency questions