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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