Towards a Brazilian History Knowledge Graph

TL;DR

This work tackles constructing a knowledge graph for Brazilian history by anchoring the DHBB to Wikidata/Wikipedia through NLP-driven entity mapping. It reports that only about half of the DHBB thematic entries currently map to Wikidata, revealing significant gaps and the need for curation and crowdsourcing. The authors review prior DHBB-related NLP work and argue for a Wikidata-centered backbone to improve extractability from Portuguese texts and search visibility. They present an initial mapping and evaluation, highlighting the necessity of human-in-the-loop curation to achieve reliable coverage. The effort aims to preserve and democratize Brazilian historical data, enabling richer queries and broader accessibility via public knowledge graphs.

Abstract

This short paper describes the first steps in a project to construct a knowledge graph for Brazilian history based on the Brazilian Dictionary of Historical Biographies (DHBB) and Wikipedia/Wikidata. We contend that large repositories of Brazilian-named entities (people, places, organizations, and political events and movements) would be beneficial for extracting information from Portuguese texts. We show that many of the terms/entities described in the DHBB do not have corresponding concepts (or Q items) in Wikidata, the largest structured database of entities associated with Wikipedia. We describe previous work on extracting information from the DHBB and outline the steps to construct a Wikidata-based historical knowledge graph.