Finding and Connecting Cultural ‘Stuff’
A new chapter has opened in my work on the European projects in the last month. One of data modelling, persistent identifiers and linked open data. All these might sound daunting but should enable a smarter and more useful Web.
Last month a Europeana v1.0 project workshop in Berlin on the Europeana Data Model (EDM). This will a high level definition of data within the Europeana system. This should allow Eurooeana to enrich data within the portal, and go some way to enable the semantic web for cultural content
Later in the month to Frankfurt to represent museums in a Europeana Connect project meeting on ‘persistent identifiers’. These are the pieces of data that:
- Uniquely identify something: digital content, objects, places, persons, organisations, events, or anything else you might want to refer to, particularly over the Internet;
- Are ‘guaranteed’ to not to change;
- Lead to some information about the thing being identified.
A familiar example of a persistent identifier (PI) is a book’s ISBN number. With this you can find the book in a library catalogue, on the Web and in a bookshop. Its usefulness is apparent to human. However the hidden usefulness is that it can be used by computers to provide services. Not having an ISBN would make all this very difficult.
In the context of Europeana the things that need to have PIs are the ‘digital objects’ that it has metadata describing and links to. The major difficulty for Europeana is that the links regularly become broken - they are not persistent. The result of this is that about a million of the 6 million records on Europeana do not lead to anywhere.
Therefore they are looking to set up a system which will support persistent identifiers. If content providers have them they will be rewarded by their content being more prominent in the Europeana portal. Unfortunately only national libraries have been looking at the use of PIs in any serious way. For archives and museums they are only vaguely on the the horizon.
Between European travel I took part in a workshop at London Bridge on linked open data. This is about exposing, sharing, and connecting data, including cultural heritage data, on the Web. The purpose of the workshop was to come up with a set of principles that museums, libraries and archives can subscribe to. These priciples will form the basis of future work to enable this.
Finally to an ATHENA plenary meeting in Berlin where amongst other things we discussed work in this area. As part of my presentation there I showed a couple of relevant videos:
- Meet Abbey a ‘digital native’ - a little girl’s ‘view’ on what we need to be doing
- Sir Tim Berners Lee on The Next Web at TED
The next two deliverables, that Collections Trust is responsible for, in the ATHENA projects are in this area:
- D3.4. Assessment of requirements for persistent identification of objects, collections and institutions, in concertation with Europeana;
- D3.5. Technical and policy infrastructure to support persistent identifiers.
However in disscussion with partners it was felt that it would be appropriate to extend the work to include all issues about finding and connecting ’stuff’. The work kicks off with a meeting of the WP3 Working Group next week at London Bridge. Here I shall be giving an introduction to the subject. There will be also be discussion of experiences and the way ahead.
Watch this space!
