Denis,
I think the rate of progress towards open cultural data is fairly
glacial here in the U.K. See my provocation to UKMW15 [1] for a summary
of some relevant issues.
As you imply, one major issue is centralization vs. silos. I support
the idea that individual institutions should take responsibility for
publishing their own resources, but in a way which is interoperable with
the rest of the community.
A central initiative which is worthy of note is the Research and
Education Space [2]. This offers a platform for cultural heritage
Linked Data resources, which a community of developers is now eager to
get to work on, developing educational applications. All it needs is
lots of cultural heritage Linked Data ...
One problem is: what does 'interoperable' look like? I have been
advocating the use of the CIDOC CRM [3] to express statements about
collections objects in an interoperable manner, but there is no
immediate answer to the problem that all actual collections data
currently held by MLAs is expressed as string values, not URLs. Most of
the software systems MLAs are using offer them no help to move towards a
Linked Data publication strategy. And (with a few exceptions, such as
the Getty vocabularies, Geonames, ...) there are no common frameworks we
can turn to as a source of such URLs.
I would be delighted to be told I'm wrong, but my impression is that
most UK institutions don't really 'get' the open/linked data idea, and
where they do, they have no idea how to go about supporting or
implementing it.
Best wishes,
Richard
[1]
http://www.slideshare.net/RichardLight/museums-home-of-unlinked-data-57824586
[2] https://bbcarchdev.github.io/res/
[3] http://cidoc-crm.org/
P.S. I thought MCG were putting all these talks up after the meeting.
Clearly not ...
On 2016-02-03 12:34 AM, Denis Nazarov wrote:
> Hello MCG,
>
> I am one of the engineers working on Mediachain.
>
> Mediachain
> <https://medium.com/mine-labs/introducing-mediachain-a696f8fd2035#.414x0afc4>
> is an open source, blockchain based metadata registry that enables
> institutions and developers to easily publish, use, link and extend media
> datasets, while maintaining attribution for contributors and creative works.
>
> Instead of releasing metadata as static data dumps
> <https://github.com/NYPL-publicdomain/data-and-utilities> or requiring
> developers to use disparate siloed APIs
> <http://museum-api.pbworks.com/w/page/21933420/Museum%C2%A0APIs>,
> Mediachain functions as a shared data layer where institutions can
> verifiably publish data. Once ingested into the datastore, developers can
> easily reuse and extend it without obscuring its source.
>
> The goal of Mediachain is to lower the barrier to publishing and consuming
> open data, while preserving data attribution. Datasets are no longer
> siloed, but integrated with one another so each new entrant has an
> opportunity to securely enrich the existing corpus.
>
> I was inspired by Mia Ridge's awesome article from 2013
> <http://www.museum-id.com/idea-detail.asp?id=387> to reach out to this
> group to ask:
>
> - What is the state of open cultural data three years later in 2016?
>
> - For technologists with experience at GLAMs, how can current open data
> strategies and practices be improved to enable richer collaboration between
> institutions and a digital audience?
>
> We are looking to pilot Mediachain with a few institutions and their open
> data and I'd love to talk to anyone interested. Here is more detail on the
> Mediachain protocol
> <https://medium.com/mine-labs/mediachain-483f49cbe37a#.vdksi4onb>.
>
> -Denis
>
> ****************************************************************
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>
--
*Richard Light*
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