Available Documents

Enslaved.org is committed to transparency and provides access to many of its internal project resources and documents prepared for external contributors. Of particular interest for data creators and contributors are Enslaved.org's Controlled Vocabularies, Metadata Documentation, and Recommended Practices, a guide on setting up a dataset regarding historical slavery. For those interested in the more complex workings of Enslaved.org's data model, see the Ontology Data Model document, Competency Questions, and Linked Open Data files.

Controlled Vocabularies - contains lists of words and phrases used to consistently categorize data values in 9 Enslaved.org fields so that slightly different words can be mapped to a standard term and therefore be effectively searched.

Metadata Documentation - describes data permitted within Enslaved.org, establishes a common understanding of Enslaved.org data. The document explicitly defines Enslaved.org records and fields and in so doing illustrates how the content, structure, and characteristics of new data can be aligned, linked together, and then searched at Enslaved.org.

Recommended Practices - provides insights on data collection practices and guidance about how to extract and format data and metadata for new datasets regarding historical slavery.

Ontology - defines a data model for the historical slave trade.

Competency Questions - lists search questions that Enslaved.org used to scope its ontology.

Linked Open Data Files - links to RDF and JSON files of complete pulls from the Enslaved.org graph database.