Re: Linking to datasets from the Cultural heritage domain

In message <C76504E1.B887%michael.hausenblas@deri.org>, Michael 
Hausenblas <michael.hausenblas@deri.org> writes
>Monika,
>
>> Are there any open datasets available to link with from the domain of
>> cultural heritage.
>
>I'm not aware of any. That said, we are working into this direction [1],
>Joachim might be able to report on a recent event related to it [2] (German,
>sorry ;) and my best guess would be to see if the MultimedianNL chaps [3]
>have something handy.

I think it's a work in progress.  I'm hoping to arrange a meeting in 
London early this year, at which museum practitioners can get together 
and discuss any progress they have made, and the potential for adopting 
a common approach.

I've made an attempt to publish the Wordsworth Trust collection as 
Linked Data [1], but it's nothing more than an experiment at present. 
Each collections object now has a unique persistent URI, but the data 
associated with it isn't very good Linked Data: hardly any URLs.  (The 
only source I could use is Geonames.)  I've implemented the 303 See Also 
strategy via a custom 404 error handler, and simply use XSLT transforms 
to convert the source data (which is all XML) into the desired formats.

My conclusions from this exercise are that (a) we need a common ontology 
for the predicates we need to record, (b) the CIDOC CRM is suboptimal 
for this task, since we need the simplest information structure we can 
get away with, (c) there is a major requirement for (shared) URLs for 
the entities we want to link to our objects (people, places, events, 
...), and a means of mapping to these URLs, starting from the textual 
information found in existing collections data and (d) if we can crack 
this problem we can deal with all of history, not just museum 
collections data.

Richard

[1] e.g. http://collections.wordsworth.org.uk/object/GRMDC.C104.2 
responds to the Accept header to deliver results as RDF, XTM (Topic 
Maps) or HTML.  The XTM needs attention.
-- 
Richard Light

Received on Saturday, 2 January 2010 16:12:03 UTC