One of the bottlenecks to get museum data in the Linked Data Cloud is that it is hard to do it. The Europeana and CRM ontologies are large and complicated, and it is difficult to map data from the museum databases to these ontologies. For the last few years we’ve been working on tools to help people map their data to ontologies without programming or without writing scripts in languages such as xpath and XSLT. The tool is called Karma, and you can download it from http://isi.edu/integration/karma.
We would like to propose a session to show Karma. We have used it with datasets from several museums, and would like to show how we mapped the data from the Smithsonian American Art museum to the Europeana ontology (41,000 objects and 8,000 artists) and how we did linking to DBpedia, the NY Times and several other datasets. We think that Karma makes the process much easier than using other tools, and we’d love to hear what you think, and hopefully provide you tools to help you.
We presented a paper about this last month at the Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC) in Montpellier. You can get the paper at http://bit.ly/11X5YPo and the slides at http://slidesha.re/18vxMnn. I am very proud to say that we received the best in-use paper award for this work, and makes me very happy that our work with the Smithsonian museum was recognized at the conference.
You can also browse the data on the SPARQL endpoint. We are using Pubby (same thing as DBpedia), but looking forward to getting better tools from you. So check it out, here is the page for John Singer Sargent.
Pedro Szekely