Expanding the Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland Knowledge Graph

The Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland (VRTI) is an online resource which digitally reconstructs the archival collections lost with the destruction of the Public Office of Ireland in 1922. This resource includes a distributed Knowledge Graph (KG), which employs SemanticWeb principles and Linked Data to support discoverability of historical entities across multiple archival collections. CIDOC-CRM serves as the core ontology, extended with bespoke types to address domain-specific needs. The VRTI-KG was deployed successfully in June 2022, at the end of the first phase of the VRTI’s development. The second phase of VRTI-KG development witnessed challenges arising from expanding data sources, advances in technology, an expanding user base, and advanced user requirements. This article focuses on the technical solutions developed to overcome these challenges, which include: developing a robust URI structure; updating and expanding the ontology; uplifting authoritative geospatial data; and creating a map interface to facilitate public engagement. Finally, two bespoke user interfaces were created for the KG; the KG Editor is designed to enable domain experts to interact intuitively with the KG, while the KG Explorer allows public users to navigate seamlessly between historical data in the VRTI-KG and the reconstructed archival records in the VRTI document database.