Dear Stephen, 

Many thanks for this. I think this is why CT launched the SPECTRUM Partners Scheme (see http://www.collectionslink.org.uk/programmes/spectrum) a few years back - to provide a forum for Collections Management System providers to share intelligence about current and future needs, and to map out a development path to meet them which builds on established practice and systems but opens them up for more flexible re-use. 

There is a SPECTRUM Roadmap meeting at this year's OpenCulture conference (http://www.collectionslink.org.uk/openculture2013) at which we will be discussing the medium to long-term requirement and hearing from the SPECTRUM Partners about how this is playing out in individual institutions, and I hope as many people as possible will be able to participate in this.

I think it really underlines how much effort these companies put into technical Research & Development on behalf of the sector, which is something we often don't acknowledge. Most of the SPECTRUM Partners are currently participating in a project which CT is leading called 'Europeana Inside', which is about developing an open-source kit, embedded into Collections Management Systems, which allows for flexible re-flowing of data to different end-points (initially, to the Culture Grid and Europeana, but we hope in the fullness of time to incorporate delivery to Wikipedia, Google Cultural Institute, Flickr Commons and Wikimedia Commons). 

The vision of this project is that the delivery of content, formatted to the schemata of different destination services should be controllable from within the same workflows a museum uses to manage its collections information. Ultimately, I would hope that this would greatly facilitate the 'Create Once, Publish Everywhere' model by facilitating the 'wrapping' of content with different formats for re-use in different contexts. 

More info about Europeana Inside can be found at http://www.europeana-inside.eu/home/index.html. The Collections Trust is also leading proposals under the current round of EU funding for a thematic network on the republishing of Public Sector Information as Open Data under the European Open Data Package. 

I think that there is a cautionary tale to be had from OAI - there was a time when everyone said OAI was the future of re-using museum information (and Z39.50 before it). Many of the system developers duly provided OAI integration (in and out) as part of their systems, only to find that the customer base (museums) largely weren't demanding it. From this, I think we learnt that this is not really (or not only) a technical problem. If museum policies are not yet at the point at which there is a strategic commitment to the publishing of linked data, then the capability to do so is not going to solve the problem, and the financial motivation won't be there for commercial partners to invest the time and effort in doing it.

I can see how COPE gets us to the point where we *can* do it, but whether or not museums *will* do it really comes down to whether your organisation has embraced the marketing, engagement and professional (internally and externally) benefit of being open. This is also why I think the BM work is really important - it is not just the brilliant work that Dominic has been doing, but the fact that high-level policy decisions have been made about opening up data as a result. 

Finally, thanks to everyone for the huge interest in this proposed meeting. I would love to organise it as a joint CT/MCG effort, and to hold it in early June. We are looking into venues in York and Sheffield, and I will circulate a date/venue/time asap. 

With thanks, and all best, 

Nick





Nick Poole
Chief Executive Officer
Collections Trust

Insurance for Museums Conference 2013
25 April 2013 * British Library Conference Centre 
 
2-3 July 2013, The Kia Oval 
www.openculture2013.org.uk



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-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Stephen McConnachie
Sent: 05 April 2013 07:54
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: New blog on Collections Link - Create Once, Publish Everywhere & ResearchSpace

Hi everyone,

It probable that one way to reach a critical mass with LOD uptake is to embed the key bits of functionality in the systems, making the operations reasonably straightforward for the user, as Richard is aiming to do, and Adlib and others are also planning.

I wonder if there's any scope for a joined up approach from the main system suppliers, in dialogue with user groups and maybe workshops at LOD events such as Nick is suggesting?

Is it feasible to convene a joint workshop (with Modes, Adlib, Axiell Calm, Selago, System Simulation, etc) at such an event, to discuss a strategy? Is it possible to share ideas without threatening business models?

Maybe that discussion is already happening offline?

Stephen

On 4 Apr 2013, at 16:25, Richard Light <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> On 04/04/2013 16:09, Mia wrote:
>> In terms of practicalities, are there any use cases for other 
>> organisations testing out the BM's model?  One potential use might be 
>> using it as a basis for linking to collections across various museum 
>> sites e.g. Wellcome links to similar objects on the Science Museum 
>> site which links to others on the British Museum site which in turn 
>> links out.  To a large extent those object-specific links wouldn't be 
>> automagically machine-discoverable, so it would require both a 
>> willingness to link to other collections sites and some curatorial input - is that at all realistic given current resources?
> I'm actively planning to adopt the BM model in as wholesale a manner as possible, once I get my hands on it, for use in the Linked Data publication framework for Modes data.  This adoption will take the form of an XSLT transform to convert Modes Object data to RDF.  In principle this will allow any Modes user to publish their collection as BM-compatible Linked Data.  However ...
> 
> * at present only a few Modes users are in a position to adopt this
>   framework (though I can guarantee that there will be at least one!)
> * the compatibility will be at the structural level, i.e. the CRM
>   predicates will match.  However, the subjects and objects will
>   probably not match up.  To use my wall metaphor, the mortar will be
>   compatible but the bricks won't
> * Modes doesn't do SPARQL end-points, so querying the data will have
>   to be done differently
> 
> Still, that would be a start. I'm looking at providing some sort of VoID description to facilitate crawling of the whole resource, so it should be possible for an aggregator to build a central database with all this RDF in it.  At which point we could start doing the "similar object" type searches.
> 
> Richard
> 
> --
> *Richard Light*
> 
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