Glossary

ADAPT: Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre

Application Programming Interface

Augmented Reality

a specific piece of information about a person, place, office, or organization entity. Attributes for a ‘person entity’ might include name, date of birth or religion, for example.

A record created in electronic format which has never existed in printed or physical format.

A portion of a larger digital object for which a range of digital images has been defined as an ‘image sequence’. This image sequence is associated with a metadata object in the database. Take a hypothetical example of a book with 100 pages. The book has 10 sections each with 10 pages. The entire volume including the cover and backcover of the book is digitized to create a single large digital object with over associated 100 images. The ‘chunks’ are created by defining the image sequences for each of the 10 chapters resulting in 10 ‘chunks’ each with 10 images.

CIDOC CRM is an extensible ontology for concepts and information in cultural heritage and museum documentation. It is the international standard for the controlled exchange of cultural heritage information

The five core archival partners, whose participation in the Project is critical to its success, are detailed below: The National Archives of Ireland, The Irish Manuscripts Commission, The National Archives UK, The Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, The Library, Trinity College Dublin

A free, simple, and standardized way to grant copyright permissions for creative and academic works

Dictionary of Irish Biography

Digital objects include digital images, metadata, and born-digital documents in electronic format such as TEI-XML.

Digitized materials include digital images created by scanning or digital photography of physical archives or other historical records.

A category within the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland metadata model. A Direct Replacement is a ‘Link Type’. It describes a source that directly replaces a record destroyed in 1922: the quality of the replacement is indicated by the replacement grade. See also: Indirect Replacement, Para-Replacement, Salved. For additional explanation, read the VRTI User’s Guide.

Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sports and Media

The Expert Advisory Group on Centenary Commemorations (Chair Dr Maurice Manning, Vice-Chair Dr Martin Mansergh) was established by the Taoiseach in 2011 and meets regularly in the Department of the Taoiseach. Its role is to advise the Government on historical matters relating to the Decade of Centenaries, and to consult widely with academic, community and voluntary groups and members of the public to ensure that significant events are commemorated accurately, proportionately and appropriately in tone. The group is non-partisan and composed of independent members from around the country.

Entity Linking - The process of identifying a specific referent for a mentioned entity in a document

A search engine based on the Lucene library

A person, place, office, or organization extracted from the historical records

FAIR stands for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. The FAIR Data Principles were developed and endorsed by researchers, publishers, funding agencies and industry partners in 2016 and are designed to enhance the value of all digital resources

A period of time when a person was most active. Used in place of known birth and death dates

The highest level of description for a collection of records in an archive.

Graphics Library Transmission Format

An informal term used by researchers to refer to a destroyed original record, e.g. an archival object lost in the fire of 1922, for which the Treasury includes some archival description

An artificial intelligence model of a type of handwriting that enables Machine Transcription of handwritten documents

Handwritten Text Recognition, or ‘Machine Transcription’

International Image Interoperability Framework

A category within the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland metadata model. An Indirect Replacement is a ‘Link Type’. It describes a source that indirectly replaces archival series destroyed in 1922. Indirect replacements were not held by the PROI, but they originate from the same offices whose records were destroyed in 1922; and they were, therefore, created as part of the same transactional and archival processes as the lost 'originals' which they indirectly replace. For instance, some original public records were taken from Irish repositories and passed into private custody before the foundation of the PROI, and now survive in other repositories. These originals are indirect replacements for archivally related materials, which were accessioned by the PROI from 1867 and were destroyed in 1922. Similarly, parish registers were accessioned by the PROI, but many were later returned to their parishes and now are held by the Representative Church Body Library: these are classed as indirect replacements for the Parish Registers series destroyed in 1922. See also: Direct Replacement, Para-Replacement, Salved. For additional explanation, read the VRTI User’s Guide.

A catalogue, created by Beyond 2022, of the contents of the PROI. The spine of the Inventory of Loss is Herbert Wood’s Guide to the Contents of the Public Record Office (1919), supplemented by the ‘Transfer and Increment Books’ which record the accessioning of archives by the PROI from the 1860s onwards. These data have been structured into an electronic database by Beyond 2022.

A catalogue, created by Beyond 2022, of all replacement material (series or items) discovered in other libraries and archives.

Information Retrieval

Irish Research Council

International Standard for Archival Description (General version)

Knowledge Graph

A network graph which organizes data in terms of different entities or concepts and connects their attributes and relationships with meaningful links.

A category within the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland metadata model. Link Type describes the nature of a link made between two metadata objects in the database. When searching the Treasury, users can filter results by Link Type by choosing the dropdown list labelled ‘Link’. See also: Direct Replacement, Indirect Replacement, Para-Replacement, Salved, Source Grade, Source Format. For additional explanation, read the VRTI User’s Guide.

A Knowledge Graph that is available on the Web and interlinked with additional external Knowledge Graphs, also on the Web

A free and open-source search engine software library

Electronic text generated by Artificial Intelligence using Handwritten Text Recognition technologies See also HTR, Transkribu

Data about data

National Archives of Ireland

Named Entity Classification - The process of identifying the type of thing identified during Named Entity Recognition. See also, EL, NER

Named Entity Recognition - The process of automatically reading through a text based document and identifying which words are references to “things” be they people, place, or other. See also, Named Entity Classification, EL.

Named Entity Recognition and Classification. See also, Named Entity Classification, NER, EL.

NLP Interchange Format

The National Library of Ireland

Natural Language Processing

Open Archives Information System

Optical Character Recognition

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

A type of controlled vocabulary establishing a shared understanding of concepts, categories, and relationships within a subject area

Web Ontology Language

A Para-Replacement is a category within the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland metadata model. An Para-Replacement is a ‘Link Type’. It describes a source whose provenance, archival history and content makes it distinct from, but cognate with, PROI collections. The para-replacement was not part of the PROI collection, and it was created as part of different transactional and archival processes from the lost 'originals' to which it is related. It is, however, related in terms of its content or administrative/biographical history. Examples of sources in this category include legal cases originating in Ireland that were appealed to courts in England, whose records survive in English administrative collections; state papers of royal office-holders relating to their administrations in Ireland, but retained in their private custody; and other administrative records originating in England concerning Irish affairs. See also: Direct Replacement, Indirect Replacement, Salved. For additional explanation, read the VRTI User’s Guide.

Any archive, library or other institution cooperating with the Beyond 2022 research programme

Principal Investigator

Public Record Office of Ireland

Public Record Office of Northern Ireland

Resource Description Framework. RDF is a framework for describing resources on the web. RDF is designed to be read and understood by computers. RDF is not designed for being displayed to people. RDF is written in XML.

A standard model for representing and linking structured information on the web, used by the Virtual Treasury to store knowledge graph data.

API = application programming interface. This is a concept in software technology that essentially refers to how multiple applications can interact with and obtain data from one another. REST refers to the architectural style of the API.

‘Salved’ is a category within the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland metadata model. ‘Salved’ is a ‘Link Type’. It describes an original PROI document which survived the 1922 fire. The National Archives of Ireland is the custodian of these salved records.

Records saved from the explosion and fire in the PROI's Record Treasury in 1922. The National Archives of Ireland is the custodian of these records.

The framework for recording and organizing an entity’s attributes and relations. Each entity type has its own schema

Source Format is a field in the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland database to describe the format of sources, such as ‘handwritten’ or ‘printed’. When searching the Treasury, users can filter results by ‘format’ by choosing from the dropdown list labelled ‘Format’. The full list of formats is available in the VRTI User Guide.

Source Grade is a field in the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland database to describe the quality or grade of sources, such as ‘original’ or ‘index’. When searching the Treasury, users can filter results by grade by choosing the dropdown list labelled ‘Grade’. The full list of grades is available in the VRTI User Guide.

SPARQL is the W3C standard for querying RDF datasets.

A term used informally by the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland researchers to refer to the database associations or internal links made between items in the ‘Inventory of Loss’ and the ‘Inventory of Survival’. See also ‘chunk’, ‘chunking’

Data which conforms to a data model and has a well defined structure

A smaller grouping of information within the Knowledge Graph

Trinity College Dublin, Library of

Text Encoding Initiative

The National Archives, UK

Transkribus is a comprehensive platform for the automated transcription and searching of historical documents.

A triplestore or RDF store is a purpose-built database for the storage and retrieval of triples through semantic queries. A triple is a data entity composed of subject-predicate-object

Universal Resource Identifier

A formal standard for the entity types and relations. It is usually seen as a lightweight version of an ontology

Virtual Reality

A specification for displaying 3D computer graphics over a web browser

A specification for accessing virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) resources over the web

A guide to the records deposited in the Public Record Office of Ireland (Dublin, 1919) by Herbert Wood

Extended Reality (XR), an umbrella term encompassing Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality (MR)