Not just collections

It seems that a lot of the LOD-LAM discussion and activity so far has centered on collections — the stuff sitting in collection management systems and databases. This is of course a natural starting point, but it might be good to consider what else there is that would benefit from LOD treatment. In particular, I’m interested in thinking about what we can do with the large amounts of contextual and interpretative material that LAMs produce — online exhibitions, finding aids, fact sheets, publications, encyclopedias, indexes, photo galleries and more. These sorts of things are packed with unstructured data — people, places, events and of course links to the collection dbs. By extracting and exposing these structures and linking into local authority systems and the LOD cloud we could create rich structures for discovery and understanding.

And then there’s material in the cloud — Flickr and elsewhere — as well as the work of our users, captured in blog posts or Zotero libraries. How might we start to develop a set of tools and practices that encourage semantic links across the wider LAM ecosystem?