Welcome to the Letters project.

This is a project which aims to provide a searchable database of letters from authors during the Nineteenth century and ways of exploring the social graph of these letters.

What is a Social Graph?

The social graph is the connections between people. The term appears to have been coined to discuss the links on the Facebook service and has been used across various social networking sites. I thought it would be interesting to try to apply the theory to an original form of communication - letters.

The social graph requires a series of nodes which connect and this project aims to provide a series of authors in time as nodes.

Currently only one node (author), Charles Dickens, is being provided whilst the project is being developed. On top of this, this project aims to create an RDF ontology to describe the links within a text and allow for Semantic Web technologies to create serivces.

Why Open Knowledge?

The Open Knowledge Foundation encourages the opening up of datasets and codes.

Licencing should not be restrictive rather it should clarify the position of the user.

The project will release all its data under various forms in as open a fashion as possible.

The source texts currently come from the Project Gutenberg library but I am open to other sources which comply with the Open Knowledge Definition.