Provocation given to UKMW15 on the state of Linked Data in the cultural heritage field

1. Museums: the
home of unlinked
data
RICHARD LIGHT, UKMW15

2. What stars do you see?

3. Get those stars organised …

4. Search for “identifying stars linked
data”

5. The hell that is textual labelling
‘Winston Churchill’

6. ‘Same string’=‘Same thing’ Simple!
http://dbpedia.org/resource/Winston_Churchill
http://dbpedia.org/resource/MS_Winston_Churchill
???

7. Rarity value: U.K. museum LD
resources
British Museum
National Gallery
Wordsworth Trust

8. And they’re all silos …
British Museum own-brand URLs or (worse) text strings

9. How can we ‘bridge gaps, make
connections’ with our data?
 Pool our data: but e.g. Culture Grid is moribund
 Publish independently, but in a compatible way
 Share common authorities

10. CIDOC-CRM can be the ‘mortar’ in
the ‘wall’
Structure(CRM)
Concept (text/URL)

11. What does CSV buy us?

12. Tate/MoMA CSV: where do I hang
my enhancements?
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/lynda-benglis-7290
Ouch !!

13. Ditch those one-off APIs (well, you
have …)

14. Your collection as Linked Data:
branding!!
http://collection.britishmuseum.org/id/object/MCT3635

15. A vision of Linked Data suburbia …
Everyone’s doing it,
modestly
BM still has the only hotel

16. Pelagios: co-operation is possible!

17. Shared resources: is it just
Geonames (and Getty)?
Free Geo-referencing!!
Make existing records into
Linked Data!

18. Let’s see some authorities being
authoritative …
National Maritime Museum?
Imperial War Museum/National Army Museum?

19. Licensing: essential if you want to
play the RES game
Resources for teachers
Mediated via the BBC
Have to be Linked Data
Require an explicit
licence statement
MASSIVE opportunity for
museums to share their
content

20. Linked Data: web-scale foreign
keys for the things we care about
 It’s not about RDF!
 It’s not about SPARQL!!
 It’s not about inference!!!
It’s about UNIQUE, PERSISTENT,
DEREFERENCEABLE, SHARED
URIs for the things in our world

21. Thank you!
Richard Light
@richardofsussex
http://light.demon.co.uk/wordpress/