dataLegend
The linked-data ecosystem behind CLARIAH’s structured historical data — datasets, the tools to publish and query them, and the stories built on top of them.
What it is
dataLegend is CLARIAH’s ecosystem for everything linked data: a triplestore (Druid) hosting historical socio-economic datasets as RDF, tools to create and publish Linked Open Data, grlc for turning stored SPARQL queries into shareable REST APIs, and Data Stories — narrative pages built directly on top of live linked datasets rather than static exports. In CLARIAH-NL’s newer projects, SSHOC-NL and Macroscope, we continue building on this ecosystem: a knowledge graph of CLARIAH tooling connected to the SSHOC Open Marketplace, and an open version of Data Stories.
Why it matters
Historical social-science data is scattered across archives, projects, and formats that don’t talk to each other. Publishing it as linked data only pays off if the surrounding tooling makes it usable — queryable without writing SPARQL by hand, shareable as an API, explorable as a narrative rather than a raw dataset dump. That’s what dataLegend’s tools are for, and why the newer projects keep extending the same ecosystem rather than starting over each time.
Details
- Triplestore: Druid
- API layer: grlc — turns SPARQL queries stored on GitHub into RESTful APIs
- Narrative layer: CLARIAH Data Stories
- Continued in SSHOC-NL and Macroscope: a CLARIAH tooling knowledge graph linked to the SSH Open Marketplace, and an open version of Data Stories
- Built and maintained as part of CLARIAH-NL, the Dutch national research infrastructure for arts, humanities and social sciences
rev 1598be5 · updated 26 Jul 2026 · “Rewrite Structured Datahub entry as dataLegend”