Hi Jeremy,
Thanks for that. I think it's important not to be downhearted about the number of museum datasets not openly available to the network. I know the principles have been axiomatic in Techworld for a while, but they're very, very far from it in Humanworld (much less in ManagerLand but I'm getting carried away...)
I think there are a combination of factors at play here:
It's all a bit new
It's not yet plug'n'play
It's a bit scary
It's untested in the cultural world
I don't have to (it's not in Accreditation...)
I maintain that we're on a growth curve and we're still rounding off the 'digitise everything' phase in anticipation of the 'share everything' phase (in a sensible, managed way, I hope). I'm sure others will get back to the list with examples of opened-up datasets, and I think they (and Seb and Jim) deserve a round of applause for being early-adopters. It's going to take, in reality, 2-3 years before this kind of behaviour becomes a norm across an industry which spans, lest we forget, some very very small players. It'll also probably take some enlightened funder to invest not in digitising new stuff, but in opening up the old stuff.
I don't think it's a lack of imagination - look at it the other way round: Why should they? There's no impetus to do it, other than the tech community promising some pretty loosely-defined long-term benefits. To drag out the old maxim 'what gets measured gets managed' - nobody's looking, so why should the majority of museums bother (particularly when there are so many other things which *are* measured these days). I'll bet that the majority who set up OAI targets did so in response to some bit of project funding or other and that their managers may not even know that they *are* exposing the data.
Now, if we could get Digital delivery into Accreditation, or, heaven forbid, Local Authority improvement indicators, we'd be laughing...
On the subject of persistent identifiers/authoritative URI's - absolutely. The Collections Trust is actually leading on a Work Package under the EDL/Europeana to scope and implement this. We have a number of persistent identifier schemes for institutions (including libraries and archives), but it is still our fundamental aim in life to enable the formation of an expression as:
http://www.InstitutionURI/CollectionURI/ObjectURI (don't click on it, it goes nowhere) - where 'ObjectURI' is a persistent identification scheme that is applicable (and applied) to physical and digital objects.
This is by no means a simple challenge - not least because you're not starting from a clean slate - but we've got a bit of cash and the impetus to do it (everything else, in the sense of non-semantic, current-gen interoperability, seems to depend on it to some degree). Later in the year, we'll be announcing it as a bit of work and enlisting some help from the Group and the International community to look at options. It'd be even better if we got some grassroots support for doing it (hint hint).
Cheers,
Nick
Nick Poole
Chief Executive
Collections Trust
www.collectionstrust.org.uk
www.collectionslink.org.uk
www.cuturalpropertyadvice.gov.uk
Tel: 01223 316028
Fax: 01223 364658
Company Registration No: 1300565
Reg. Office: 22 Hills Road, Cambridge, CB2 1JP.
The Collections Trust believes that everybody, everywhere should have the right to access and benefit from cultural collections. Our aim is to develop programmes and standards which help connect people and culture.
The Collections Trust was launched from its predecessor body, the MDA, in March 2008.
-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Ottevanger, Jeremy
Sent: 02 June 2008 17:49
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Linking Open Data
Hi Richard,
"It seems to me that museums should get in there and publish
authoritative URIs for their own collection objects."
I'd agree, but I'm nursing some disappointment with reality at the
moment (yet again - it's the curse of the optimist). Having never really
checked all that thoroughly I was sure that there must be plenty of
museums out there that do actually publish their data in some machine
processable way. After all, I reasoned, we know that plenty of them have
used OAI-PMH for data aggregation projects, and institutions like the
Getty must (you'd think) have their stuff accessible in CDWA [Lite]. A
corrolary of this would hopefully be nice stable URLs for each object.
My trawl yesterday was disappointing. I should make honourable mention
of Seb at Powerhouse and Jim at NMM, both of whom have made available an
OpenSearch interface [1]. Besides that, I could find no institutions
actually publicising/promoting programmatic access to their collection
data (i.e. in some way other than as web pages). It may be that there
are feeds out there that just aren't promoted on the websites, so my
Googling doesn't turn them up (this is the case with Powerhouse and NMM,
too, at present, but I knew of their existence). If so perhaps I'm
missing scores of other museums that have also opened up their data. I
have to say I was rather surprised. I did find examples of OAI-PMH use
by museums stretching back to 2002, but it's always been about
aggregation and no-one has taken the step of exposing the resources to
the wider web. I guess it's not the same as saying that there aren't
still some relatively stable URLs out there (any PURLs, anyone?) but
it's worse than I thought. I'm dearly hoping, though, that someone will
pipe up with a few examples that I'm unaware of.
So, not knowing an awful lot about OAI gateways, I'm wondering, are
there technical reasons why so few (if any) of the institutions that
have these gateways have made the interface public, or is it a matter of
politics, or perhaps just not making the small mental leap from using
the gateway for aggregation to using it for direct dissemination?
On the question of authoritative URIs, is there a job for Collections
Trust here? I would really like to see work on a mechanism for
standardising/hosting stable URLs, and I can imagine them organising it.
Certainly I'd have thought it needs some sort of centralised effort at
least to kick start things, if not control them in the longer term.
Cheers, Jeremy
[1] for convenience, here are links to searches on each of these,
cribbed from Seb and Jim's earlier MCG posts. Note that the objects
themselves don't have an end-point URI other than their web page, but at
least they're nice metadata rich pages.
http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/collection/database/opensearch/search.ph
p?s=compass&start=1&show=50
http://www.nmm.ac.uk/collections/requestHandlers/doQuickSearch.cfm?searc
hterm=midshipman&startrow=&format=rss
Jeremy Ottevanger
Web Developer, Museum Systems Team
Museum of London Group
46 Eagle Wharf Road
London. N1 7ED
Tel: 020 7410 2207
Fax: 020 7600 1058
Email: [log in to unmask]
www.museumoflondon.org.uk
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-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
Richard Light
Sent: 02 June 2008 10:17
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [MCG] Linking Open Data
Hi,
The Linking Open Data initiative:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_Data
http://esw.w3.org/topic/SweoIG/TaskForces/CommunityProjects/LinkingOpenD
a
ta
looks interesting. Having a quick play with dbPedia:
http://dbpedia.org/About
shows the possibilities: real "Semantic Web" query support at last!
("find all musicians born in Berlin before 1900", that sort of thing)
Has anyone taken the Triplification Challenge? It seems to me that
museums should get in there and publish authoritative URIs for their own
collection objects.
Richard
--
Richard Light
XML/XSLT and Museum Information Consultancy [log in to unmask]
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