Anastasija RomanLOD

The Grand Duchess of Russia

Discover the Project

A LOD Project - The Linked Open Data Environment

Anastasija Romanov - An intriguing historical figure

Grand Duchess Anastasija Nikolaevna Romanov (18 June 1901 – 17 July 1918) was the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, the last sovereign of Imperial Russia, and his wife Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna. She lived just seventeen years because the night of July 16-17, 1918, Anastasia and her family were executed in Yekaterinburg, Russia. But in the years following the Romanovs’ murders, speculation arose as to whether she and her brother, Alexei Nikolaevich, might have survived the execution. Rumors circulated that they were shielded from the bullets by family jewels that had been sewn into their clothing for safekeeping. The location of their bodies was unknown until 2007.
Anastasia's fate was particularly apt to these conjectures, as many women claiming to be the Grand Duchess periodically surfaced. Among the best known of these women there was Anna Anderson (aka Franziska Schanzkowska), who, beginning in the early 1920s fought to prove herself the rightful claimant of Anastasia’s inheritance. Anderson's suit was rejected in 1970, and the mystery of the Grand Duchess Anastasia remained unsolved.
In the 1970s an amateur archaeologist found a shallow grave containing the well-aged skeletons of six adults and three children. He suppressed these findings from the public until the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s. A forensic investigation in 1991 identified the nine bodies as belonging to Anastasia’s family members and servants, but Anastasia and her brother's bodies still appeared to be missing. In the end, in 2007 a new DNA analysis of another grave, discovered near the first, conclusively identified Anastasia and Alexei's bodies, closing the door on nearly 90 years of mystery and speculation.
Even if Anastasija’s mystery is not a mystery anymore, we have been fascinated by this story as well as many other people. Infact, Anastasia's dubious whereabouts inspired books, plays and movies. The purported survival of Anastasia has been the subject of cinema, including the 1997 animated film (that we all loved) and the 1956 Academy Award-winning film starring legendary actress Ingrid Bergman, made-for-television films, and a Broadway musical.

The Project

The key concept of the project Anastasija RomanLOD relies on the idea that it is possible to describe an historical person, in a full ranging perspective, starting from the connections between the person itself and other heterogenous entities, including real items coming from the different domains of libraries, archives and museums. In order to do that, we explored the possibilities offered by the technologies used in Semantic Web, such as vocabularies, ontologies, RDF and URIs. Therefore, the project’s aim is to model an organized linked open data environment that connects concepts, items, people, places, events and, more generally, data and information about Anastasija Romanov, in the most interoperable and semantically meaningful way possible.

Her History through items

This section summarizes the ten items that were taken into consideration. They were selected according to relevance and heterogeneity criteria in order to provide completeness to the project. They form a complex relationship network with the figure of Anastasija Romanov at its centre. For each item, essential metadata, a short description, and a reference link are provided.


The 1st item: A 3D facial Reconstruction of Anastasia

In 1994, a Russian forensic expert, Sergey Nikitin, finished the reconstruction models of the Imperial Family and their Servants by using the skull remnants found in 1991 on the Old Koptiaki road. Dr. Nikitin presented in 2000 - at the American Academy of Forensic Science convention, at Reno, Nevada - his paper on his identification studies of Anastasia, that has been extremely well received by the American Academy.

Go to the Item

The 2nd item: A family portrait

In this picture, taken in 1914, Anastasia is surrounded by her family. We can recognize the Czarevitch Alexis, who is hugged by Anastasia, the Czar and the Czarina,the Grand Duchess Olga, the Grand Duchess Tatiana and the Grand Duchess Marie.


Go to the Item

The 3rd item: Drifters, a historical manga

Drifters is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Kouta Hirano. It centers on various historical figures summoned to an unknown world where their skills are needed by magicians in order to save their world from total destruction. Among the characters there is also Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova, represented as a busty and slender young woman with pale white skin and drooping eyes, who is able to create supernatural blizzards.


Go to the Item

The 4th item: A book about the Romanovs

The Resurrection of the Romanovs draws on a wealth of new information from previously unpublished materials and unexplored sources to probe the most enduring Romanov mystery of all: the fate of the Tsar's youngest daughter, Anastasia, whose remains were not buried with those of her family, and her identification with Anna Anderson, the woman who claimed to be the missing Grand Duchess. The author, Greg King, reveals also previously unknown details of Anderson's life as Franziska Schanzkowska and explains how Anderson acquired her knowledge, why people believed her claim, and how it transformed Anastasia into a cultural phenomenon.


Go to the Item

The 5th item: A letter to Anastasia's cousin

This is a letter written in english by Grand Duchess Anastasia to her cousin Lord Louis Mountbatten (Dicky), the son of her mother’s eldest sister Victoria. Dicky was only a year older than Anastasia and a year younger than her sister Maria. The cousins probably only met once, in 1909, when the Romanov visited their family in England.


Go to the Item

The 6th item: Russian Revolution's Illustrated Book

In February 1917, Anastasia and her family were placed under house arrest at the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoye Selo during the Russian Revolution. Through the Russian Revolution by Albert Rhys Williams offers readers a first-hand account of the exciting and confusing events of the Russian Revolution from June 1917 to August 1918. The author, a lifelong defender of the Soviet system, documented his first adventure in Russia at its most chaotic moments: his account, while sympathetic, is precious to know about the inner workings of the Bolshevik Party, life in Petrograd and the countryside, and an optimistic vision of the revolutionary future.


Go to the Item

The 7th item: "Anastasia", 1950s Film

Anastasia was inspired by the story of Anna Anderson, the best known of the many Anastasia impostors who emerged after the Imperial family were murdered in July 1918. It's 1928 Paris. Anna (Ingrid Bergman)is a destitute woman who claims to be Anastasia. General Sergei Pavlovich Bounine (Yul Brynner) had been collecting fees to find the princess even though he doubts her existence. He sees an opportunity with Anna to collect the £10 million account from a London bank that belongs to the royal family.


Go to the Item

The 8th item: "Anastasia", 1990s Animation Movie

The purported survival of Anastasia has been the subject of cinema. Based on the legend of Grand Duchess Anastasia, the film follows an eighteen-year-old amnesiac Anastasia "Anya" Romanov who, hoping to find some trace of her deceased family, sides with two conmen who wish to take advantage of her likeness to the Grand Duchess. But the evil mystic of the Czar family, Grigori Rasputin, still wants the Romanov family to be destroyed forever.


Go to the Item

The 9th item: "Once Upon a December" Song

It is a song from the 1997 Fox Animation Studios film Anastasia, also nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song. In the motion picture Once Upon A December is sung by Anya, who is reminiscing about her forgotten past as the Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov: she sings of remembrance, memories, and a sense of forgetting something she once held near and dear to her heart.


Go to the Item

The 10th item: A Book about the Romanovs Sisters' Letters and Diaries

Helen Azar, a Romanov history expert, wrote this book in order to allow the Grand Duchesses Maria and Anastasia to tell, in their very own words, the story of the last four years of their lives during the first world war and the revolution. In particular, most of the book is made by letters both Maria and Anastasia wrote to their father between 1914 and up until shortly before their execution in the summer of 1918. Also included is Maria's 1916 diary and letters to other family members during their exile.


Go to the Item

Knowledge Organization

A gradual process of mapping, abstraction and analysis was made upon the domain of study. After a first representation through a Conceptual Map and an E/R Model, the Metadata Standards used by the different institutions to describe the items were analysed and aligned. The last two steps of the Knowledge Organization of Anastasija RomanLOD were the creation of a Theoretical Model, to expand the relationships already highlighted, to create new links between our items and others, and to add more information, and its formalization through predicates from already existing schemas, vocabularies and ontologies, i.e. the Conceptual Model. We created all the following graphs with diagrams.net (formerly draw.io), a free online diagram software, very intuitive and easy to use.

Conceptual Map

So to start with our Knowledge Organization process, we represented our domain scenario and the ten selected items through a Conceptual Map. Anastasjia Romanov is the centre of our project, and she appears also as the centre of a complex net, to which various rays are connected. Each ray brings to a particular object somehow connected to the Grand Duchess; at this stage we tried also to highlight some crucial people, places and events that make our entities interconnected with each other.



E/R Model

A second step was the abstraction of the conceptual map through a formalization, i.e. an Entity-Relationships Model (E/R Model). This represents the first shift from the specific real data as extracted from the chosen items to the abstract entities that characterize the scenario.



Metadata Analysis and Metadata Alignment

In the following section we have analysed metadata from the institutions keeping our items and we have then aligned our relationships with the relevant standards for our items.


Metadata Analysis

We have produced this metadata analyisis starting from the standards used by the institutions from which we gained information about the items. When these standards were not specified by the institutions, we have looked up for the most suitable ones in order to describe the objects according to their kind. Information about the specific standards as well as the reasons why we have adopted each of them in this analysis can be read below.


  • MARC 21 Format for Bibliographic Data is a standard provided by the Library of Congress for the representation of bibliographic information. It has been used by Archive.org for the description of the digitized version of the historical book about the Russian Revolution which we have included in our collection of items.

  • ISBD (International Standard Bibliographic Description) has been produced by the IFLA with the aim of standardizing the bibliographic description at an international level. It is composed of nine areas of descriptions, most of which (including the ISBN identifier) are present in the metadata description provided by WorldCat for the two books about Anastasia which we have selected and the manga.

  • VRA Core is a standard for the description of works of visual culture and images hosted by the Library of Congress together with the Visual Resources Association. We have chosen it for describing the 3D model representing the facial reconstruction of Anastasia.

  • Schema.org is a community-produced schema for describing data on the web founded by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex. It is a wide shared vocabulary which makes it possible to describe many different cultural objects. It contains appropriate schemas for dealing with the cinematographic as well as the musical art. Therefore, it has been considered appropriate in our project for describing the films about Anastasia and the song “Once upon a December”.

  • MODS (Metadata Object Description Schema) can be used for many purposes among which the most common one is that of describing bibliographic elements. It is the standard used by the Library of Congress for describing the photo of the royal family we have included in our project.

  • EAD (Encoded Archival Description) is an XML standard for encoding archival finding aids, maintained by the Society of American Archivists in partnership with the Library of Congress. We have considered it suitable for describing Anastasia’s handwritten letter to her cousin.

Metadata Alignment

The table below shows the result of an alignment and matching of the metadata elements and properties useful to address information related to the items selected for our project. The aim of the task is to reach a high degree of interoperability of data and, because of this, using the Dublin Core standard as the reference for the alignment, we decided to add other standards to the ones found during the metadata analysis. In particular, we added FRBRoo and CIDOC/CRM:


  • The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) provides an extensible ontology for information in cultural heritage and museum documentation, and it is the international standard for the controlled exchange of cultural heritage information. In 1994 the work focused on developing an entity-relationship model for museum information, but, in 1996, the approach shifted to object-oriented modelling methodologies, resulting in the first version of the CIDOC CRM in 1999. The process of standardizing this standard ended in 2006 with its acceptance as the ISO 21127 standard;

  • FRBRoo ("FRBR-object oriented") is the result of a joint effort, begun in 2006, of the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model and Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) to express the IFLA FRBR reference model with the concepts, tools, mechanisms, and notation conventions provided by the CIDOC CRM, and to align the two object-oriented models. FRBRoo was born with the aim to facilitate the integration, mediation, and interchange of bibliographic and museum information.

After the investigation of the different metadata standards, we identified four main categories of data used to describe the items:


  • WHO -> Metadata related to individuals or institutions;
  • WHERE -> Metadata related to geographical locations;
  • WHEN -> Metadata related to dates;
  • WHAT -> Metadata related to the form and the content of the items.


Theoretical Model

After having observed the ten items and their connections with one another and with external resources, we have produced our interpretation of the data concerning them. Therefore, for each item, we have searched for further information useful to enrich its description. Our search activity involved people, places, dates and subjects related to the considered cultural objects. We have found additional relevant data about:



  • some people, like Anastasia’s cousin or an actress performing in one of the films
  • spatial and temporal information, like the place and date of discovery of the skulls of the Romanovs, one of which has inspired the 3d model item
  • additional connections between our items, some of which are based on other ones included in our collection.
  • external resources , e.g. sources of inspiration for the production of the cultural objects or, vice versa, cultural objects inspired by our items (e.g. the anime based on the manga).

This research allowed us to enrich the Entity-Relation model that we had previously created with new entities and relationships.

The Conceptual Model: a formal representation

At this point, we have enlarged our focus at the formal level of representation exploiting the powerful tool of the ontologies. We have looked for the most appropriate schemas, vocabularies and ontologies for matching the terms previously used for describing our entities and properties in natural language. In particular, it can be noticed that:


  • Schema.org, thanks to its flexibility and its large number of properties, has been adopted for describing various kinds of objects, including the ones that are not strictly connected with LAM (like songs and movies);
  • FaBiO, FRBRoo, MODS and CIDOC CRM have been used for describing textual as well as visual items and the properties related to them;
  • DublinCore has been used instead for describing more generic properties and entities like, for example, the dates.

Knowledge Representation

Let’s now turn to the items! The following contents are meant to describe them exploiting the conceptual model that we have previously produced.

Tables

Here it is possible to visualize a table for each of our items. The tables are composed of three columns representing the three components of a triple (subject, predicate and object). Subjects and objects have been expressed in natural language, while predicates have been written using some ontology properties. There is a row for each property related to the item-subject and in every row it is possible to read a triple statement.


RDF Production

In this section, RDF data about some of our items are available. We have decided to create RDF triples referring to four of our items in order to represent four different kinds of objects and their peculiar features. RDF triples have been indeed produced for the film Anastasia (1956), the Photograph Family Portrait, the song Once Upon a December, the book Through the Russian Revolution. The URIs identifying our items have been created by us basing on the format provided on the w3id.org website, but have not been activated. The URIs representing the entities related to each item, together with the prefixes for the chosen ontologies can be read in the boxes below. Links to the same authorities for names (owl:sameAs) have been provided. We have also provided semantic connections between our items and other related cultural elements (for example the play on which the film is based) or historical events (like the Russian Revolution, which is the subject of the book). Partitive associations have been made, for example, between the song and a musical containing it, and other associative connections have been made for people and places. The triples have been written in Turtle format.


RDF production for the film Anastasia (1956)

RDF production for the Photograph Family Portrait

RDF production for the song Once Upon a December

RDF production for the book Through the Russian Revolution

RDF Representation

As a final step for the whole workflow, we have produced a visual representation of the RDF data regarding the four items previously mentioned. It has been created with the RDF Grapher tool. The graph representation begins from the node containing the URI of the Great Duchess Anastasija. The arrows, representing the predicates, link the subjects and objects of the triples.

RDF graphical representation of the following items: the film Anastasia (1956), the Photograph Family Portrait, the song Once Upon a December the book Through the Russian Revolution