In the ResearchSpace project we are aligning, and building tools to help people align, their institutional authorities for these, such as the British Museum's own:
* BM Materials - http://collection.britishmuseum.org/sparql?query=SELECT+*+%7B%3Fterm+skos%3AinScheme+%3Chttp%3A%2F%2Fcollection.britishmuseum.org%2Fid%2Fthesauri%2Fmaterial%3E%3B+skos%3AprefLabel+%3Flabel%7D&_implicit=false&implicit=true&_equivalent=false&_form=%2Fsparql
* BM People/Institutions - http://collection.britishmuseum.org/sparql?query=PREFIX+skos%3A+%3Chttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2004%2F02%2Fskos%2Fcore%23%3E%0D%0ASELECT+*+%7B%3Fterm+skos%3AinScheme+%3Chttp%3A%2F%2Fcollection.britishmuseum.org%2Fid%2Fperson-institution%3E%3B+skos%3AprefLabel+%3Flabel%7D&_implicit=false&implicit=true&_equivalent=false&_form=%2Fsparql
* BM Places - http://collection.britishmuseum.org/sparql?query=PREFIX+skos%3A+%3Chttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2004%2F02%2Fskos%2Fcore%23%3E%0D%0ASELECT+*+%7B%3Fterm+skos%3AinScheme+%3Chttp%3A%2F%2Fcollection.britishmuseum.org%2Fid%2Fplace%3E%3B+skos%3AprefLabel+%3Flabel%7D&_implicit=false&implicit=true&_equivalent=false&_form=%2Fsparql
Barry
-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Frankie Roberto
Sent: 13 December 2013 11:10
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [MCG] Tate artists
Mia wrote:
> Thank you, Richard, for sharing your work* and your conclusions. I
> agree - any uses of open cultural data would benefit from an
> authoritative set of URLs about relevant people, places, materials,
> events and concepts to use as a shared reference. In practical terms,
> does anything currently or almost in existence come close to that now?
This is definitely an issue.
My bet is that we're unlikely to get a single set of authoritative URLs / ids for people/places/etc. And there are quite a few reasons why this might be a bad idea anyway.
Instead, it seems more likely we'll continue to have a few sets of well-used references within specific domains - things like IMDB ids for films, musicbrainz ids for bands/albums, openlibrary ids for books, wikipedia ids for notable people, ISO codes for countries, and so on.
There's bound to be lots of overlap, and some contradictions, between these different sources. But that's ok - real life is messy.
The best way of dealing with multiple overlapping identifiers is to build concordances.
See, for example, the Cooper-Hewitt's list of concordances for the people in their collection: http://collection.cooperhewitt.org/concordances/people/
Foursquare do something similar for their database of places, matching them against other location databases (currently only for those with over 100K records): https://developer.foursquare.com/overview/mapping
In order to make automating these concordances as easy and reliable as possible though, I'd echo Richard's call for including as much basic data about each entity as possible, so for example full birth and death dates and alternative names for people, and rough geolocations and countries for places.
Cheers,
Frankie
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