[log in to unmask] wrote:
>
> Some of this is a little over my head (I'm not a techie, though not
> completely ignorant of what goes on under the hood), but I think I
> understand what you're getting at here in terms of creating an RDF
> representation of an object record that could be linked to. What
> benefits would this give and what would this enable people to do with
> the data? Thanks
It would essentially mean that your unique, persistent identifiers can be treated as Linked Data [1]. You already meet numbers 1 and 2 of Sir Tim's four principles of Linked Data; providing RDF would meet principle 3; and including lots of URLs pointing to related concepts would meet principle 4. Having tried this myself, I found that the last part is the hardest: most museum datasets contain strings, not URLs, describing associated people, places, events, etc. However, even if your RDF doesn't contain many URLs, the object identifiers you publish will give your collection a persistent, quotable identity in the Linked Data space.
As regards the general benefits of Linked Data for heritage information, look out for the report on a meeting on this subject which Collections Trust hosted last week.
Richard
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_Data
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