Hi,
This has been an interesting thread so far - I'd just like to chip in
with some quick observations. First though, a question:
Do we have a problem with broken links to open data? I don't see how
if, as Jeremy says, very little data has been made openly linkable to
date....
The community *should* care about persistent identifiers - they are
closely coupled with issues of preservation after all. But, based on
experience in other sectors, this can also take ages to be implemented
and adopted by the community. In fact, it hasn't always been adopted
where one might have expected it to. It would be a shame to delay good
efforts to link open data while we waited for this to become a reality.
Regarding OAI-PMH:
I'm a little puzzled by this sub-thread. OAI-PMH is for harvesting.
It's not designed for the sort of 'interoperation' we might aspire to
now - and which a few brave pioneers have shown to be possible. Where
a central service wants to provide services based on aggregations of
data from individual, distributed collections, then OAI-PMH is a
reasonable candidate mechanism. Where individual collections want to
participate in the resource-oriented web at large, we need different
mechanisms. Fortunately some good protocols and standards already
exist: HTTP, XML, RSS, RDF, DC.....
Cheers,
Paul
On 3 Jun 2008, at 14:46, Ottevanger, Jeremy wrote:
> Hi Nick,
>
> You're right, I shouldn't be too down-hearted. I was a bit off-topic
> anyway, on account of having spent the previous day looking for any
> machine-friendly object records (with mashup day in mind). Mia also
> pointed out that I was mixing up two issues a bit - PURLs and APIs.
> There may be lots more out there than I found anyway, but if it's not
> findable it's not much use!
>
> You're right that there's a challenge in making the case, but really
> that's not even really necessary - surely there's not much to do to
> make
> your OAI interface available to more than just harvesters, you just
> have
> to tell people how to find it and use it. Off-list contacts suggest
> this
> is the case. It's probably easier to do this even than to build the
> HTML
> version of each record.
>
> Still, there's a case to be made and hopefully we're as a group
> starting
> to build it. I'm very much looking forward to UKMW to see where we go
> with this, and to mashup day before that.
>
> Very good to hear that your plans are progressing re URIs etc. You've
> got my support, for what it's worth!
>
> Cheers, Jeremy
>
>
>
>
> 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
> Museum of London is changing. Visit www.museumoflondon.org.uk to
> find out more.
> Explore how the Great Fire shaped the city www.museumoflondon.org.uk/londonsburning
> Jack the Ripper and the East End a major new exhibition at Museum in
> Docklands, opens 15 May
> Before printing, please think about the environment
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
> Nick Poole
> Sent: 02 June 2008 21:34
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [MCG] Linking Open Data
>
> 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
> Museum of London is changing. Visit www.museumoflondon.org.uk to find
> out more.
> Explore how the Great Fire shaped the city
> www.museumoflondon.org.uk/londonsburning
> Jack the Ripper and the East End a major new exhibition at Museum in
> Docklands, opens 15 May Before printing, please think about the
> environment
>
>
>
> -----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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Technical Manager
UKOLN (University of Bath)
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/
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