AW: Linking to datasets from the Cultural heritage domain

Hi Monika,
 
In addition to what Michael, Richard and Milton already pointed out, you may be interested in a talk by Stefan Gradmann and Marlies Olensky at SWIB09 about Linked Data and Semantic Web based functionality in Europeana (in German also, but the slides may give you some hints about their plans - http://www.swib09.de/vortraege/20091125_gradmann_olensky.pdf).
 
At the German National Library of Economics (ZBW), we just published a technical preview for a large collection of newspaper clippings, based mainly on OAI-ORE and published as RDFa. (http://zbw.eu/beta/pm20, Announcement at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-lod/2009Dec/0175.html) For appropriate use cases, maybe this could provide a more simple information structure than CIDOC-CRM, as Richard suggested.
 
Cheers, Joachim

________________________________

Von: Monika Solanki [mailto:m.solanki@mcs.le.ac.uk]
Gesendet: Sa 02.01.2010 19:05
An: Richard Light
Cc: Michael Hausenblas; Neubert Joachim; Linked Data community
Betreff: Re: Linking to datasets from the Cultural heritage domain



Michael and Richard,

Many thanks for your reply.

Richard Light wrote:
> 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.
That is great. Would it be an open event. I am not very far from London
as was wondering if I could attend.
>
> 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.
Agree with all the above as it is a bit of the struggle for me as well
right now. I have also only been able to link to Geonames and DBpedia.

Monika
>
> 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.

--
Dr Monika Solanki
F27 Department of Computer Science
University of Leicester
Leicester LE1 7RH
United Kingdom
Tel: +44 116 252 3828
Google: 52.653791,-1.158414
http://www.cs.le.ac.uk/people/ms491

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