Linking Historical Entities to the Linked Open Data Cloud

We investigate the coverage of Wikipedia for historical public figures. Unsurprisingly, the probability of a figure having a Wikipedia entry declines with time since the person was active. Nevertheless, two thirds of the Dutch members of parliament that have been active in the last 140 years have a Wikipedia page. The need to link historical figures to existing knowledge bases like Wikipedia/DBpedia comes from current large scale efforts to digitize primary data sources, including proceedings of parliament and historical newspapers. Linking entries to knowledge bases can provide values of key background variables, such as gender, age, and (party) affiliation.