On 30/05/2015 10:46, Tony Crockford wrote:
> but what would be the absolute minimum that would catalogue an object, so that it could be*found*? There’s a place between no data at all and an endlessly extendable full dictionary of metadata, that I’d like to find.
>
> Is there not a single simple standard that says the following x items of metadata should be presented for every digital object*as a minimum*?
>
> I’ve probably missed it (I have a tendency to ignore the complex) but everything I read and look at talks about how this or that scheme can be extended thus and hence instead of a sensible common denominator there are endless layers of overlap, leading to very few common mappable data points.
The trouble with museum objects is that they can potentially be
interesting for a wide variety of reasons. Also, because we can be
dealing with any tangible (or indeed intangible) object, naturally
occurring or made by human agency, the information that is even relevant
will vary widely. I would also challenge whether 'simple' is
self-evidently what we should be aiming for. I would point to LIDO [1]
as a good example of the current state of the art, as regards
frameworks. In my view it offers a sensible balance between simplicity
of approach and an adequate treatment of the contextual nature of museum
information. However, I think it's far too complex (structurally) to be
shoehorned into Schema.org-style metadata.
Apart from the framework into which we put our metadata, there is also
the issue of how we make the actual data compatible, so that mungeing it
all together and indexing it actually gives us worthwhile information
retrieval. As a community we have been, and continue to be, a complete
dead loss when it comes to creating shared authority frameworks we can
use in our cataloguing work. Maybe that is where we should be starting?
Richard
[1] http://www.lido-schema.org/schema/v1.0/lido-v1.0-specification.pdf
--
*Richard Light*
****************************************************************
website: http://museumscomputergroup.org.uk/
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/ukmcg
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/museumscomputergroup
[un]subscribe: http://museumscomputergroup.org.uk/email-list/
****************************************************************
|