This session explores the creation of a knowledge graph derived from a digitized photographic collection documenting Las Vegas’s Historic Westside—a historically African American neighborhood shaped by civic leaders such as Dr. Charles I. West and sustained in part through his newspaper, The Las Vegas Voice. The Clinton Wright Photograph Collection captures the community’s lived experience through decades of visual documentation.
In this workshop, we focus on how these previously inaccessible materials were transformed into structured, queryable linked data. Entities such as people, events, places, and organizations were identified through a student-executed metadata workflow that combined archival research, annotation, and authority control. Entities were modeled as SKOS Concepts, typed using Schema.org classes and properties, and linked using RDF, RDFS, and OWL. AgRelOn was used to express relationships between agents (e.g., familial, professional, social), and GeoNames provided geographic context.
The session includes a walkthrough of our project strategy, integration of undergrad students in professional archives work, modeling decisions, RDF generation process, and SPARQL query examples. Attendees will gain practical strategies for applying semantic web standards to community-based digital collections, enhancing discoverability and surfacing relationships embedded in cultural memory .