Big data in digital cultural heritage present an unprecedented opportunity for historical research. However, information without context is of little use for historians. For this reason, the Time Capsule project set out to address the challenges related to semantically interconnecting a variety of dispersed multi-disciplinary data sources. Additionally, the Time Capsule project has developed a research platform that allows both historians, as well as a wider audience of expert and non-expert users to explore this complex interrelated data, by highlighting their temporal, geographical and informational context.

For data sources integration, we have developed a customized ontology, whereupon our data is mapped, following a linked-data approach. For the resulting RDF datastore, we do not only provide a SPARQL end-point, but also a graphhical interface, so that users may explore the knowledge base content by applying both exploratory search, as well as a user-friendly natural language wizard for ad hoc SPARQL queries.