Month: November 2012

Team: Reload

Country: Italy

Team Leader: Silvia Mazzini

Team Members: Brunella Argelli (IBC), Agostino Attanasio (ACS), Ilaria Barbanti (regesta.exe), Giovanni Bruno (regesta.exe), Silvia Mazzini (regesta.exe), Mirella Plazzi (IBC), Francesca Ricci (IBC), Chiara Veninata (ACS)

Partners
Archivio Centrale dello Stato ACS (State Central Archives, http://www.acs.beniculturali.it/) – a body of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and activities endowed with special autonomy – is the archival depository Institute of the Unified State’s documentary heritage.
Istituto Beni Culturali Regione Emilia Romagna IBC (http://ibc.regione.emilia-romagna.it) is the scientific and technical instrument for the Emilia-Romagna regional planning in the field of artistic, cultural and environmental heritage. IBC develops the IT facilities that convey archives, libraries and museums data to institutions and the general public, promotes and coordinates the census and the description of archival, book and museum material, grants the readability of specific DBs on the web and at present IBC’s working on the standards for interoperability through the use of semantic web technologies.
Regesta.exe (http://www.regesta.com) provides to any type of cultural institution with services and tools, allowing to create, manage, retrieve and access online documentary, iconographic and audiovisual resources.

Goal
Goal of Reload project is to experiment with Semantic Web technical standards and methods relating to linked open data in order to further the sharing of data among a broad range of archives and other cultural institutes. In details, this project is designed to verify the possibility to create a “”web of archival data””, by exploring Semantic Web technologies to link differnt datasets of cultural heritage domain. This experience aims at applying Semantic Web technology to create Linked Open Data of archival descriptions and of entities related to them.

Team: Canvas

Country: Australia

Team Leader: Tim Wray

What ways of seeing can Linked Open Data bring to our collections? Offering unparalleled access to structured knowledge, we often envision it as a giant nebulous cloud, bringing together the silos of data into a conglomeration of nodes, links and connections.

But how can we envision these connections in a meaningful way? How can we represent these knowledge structures at the macro level? How can we create visualisations of Linked Open Data that convey meaning and entice curiousity?

As an independent researcher, I’m interested in creating immersive interactive experiences for museum collections within the digital medium – be that on the Web, the screen or the tablet device.

The physical museum exhibition is crafted by a careful selection of works that exploits the spatial properties of the physical building to present works thematically, chronologically, or by some other means that expresses a narrative. In my work, I rely on the spatial concepts of pathways and divergences as a framework for visualizing my interactive experiences – allowing visitors to explore and browse in ways that mimic a thematically induced exhibition built from concepts mined from data. I’ve built prototypes and concepts that have expressed this ideal, and I’m currently looking to incorporate Linked Open Data so that I can provide enriched data to seed and create more meaningful pathways. The work is intended both as an investigation into new conventions for expressing online collections, and as a case study on how Linked Open Data can be represented in novel and compelling ways.

My work is based on the idea that humans think in terms of concepts, associations and similarity, and that we are fundamentally curious creatures. It is based on over 15 years of research into conceptual clustering and I’m currently investigating how concept lattices can be used to mine, link and depict themes that create landscapes of pathways that are inviting to the curious explorer.

Team: Linked Jazz

Country: United States

Team Leader: Cristina Pattuelli

Team Members: Matthew Miller, Leanora Lange, Hilary Thorsen, Jared Negley, Carolyn Li-Madeo, Sean Fitzell

Linked Jazz is an ongoing project investigating the potential of the application of Linked Open Data technology to enhance the discovery and visibility of digital cultural heritage materials. More specifically, the project focuses on digital archives of jazz history to expose relationships between musicians and reveal their community’s network. New modes of connecting cultural data and making them searchable as a whole in a seamless discovery environment would open unprecedented opportunities to create new kinds of meaning and elicit new streams of interpretation. The goal of this project is to help uncover meaningful connections between documents and data related to the personal and professional lives of musicians who often practice in rich and diverse social networks.

Team: maphub

Country: International

Team Leader: Bernhard Haslhofer

Team Members: Werner Robitza, Keith Newman

Old maps are a record of the past, exposing features people might want to tell stories about. We built Maphub, which is a prototype Web application that enables them to do so by creating annotations on digitized high-resolution historical maps. By semantically tagging regions on the map, users create associations between their annotations and resources in open Web-based data networks. These associations are leveraged to enable multilingual search and to generate overlays of historical maps on modern mapping applications. Contributed annotations are shared on the Web following the W3C Open Annotation specification. Maphub is built on the Linked Data technology stack and a first demo has been setup with the Library of Congress’ historical map collection. The high-level goal of this project is (i) to showcase how existing Linked data can be USED and integrated into existing scholarly processes, such as annotations, and (ii) vice-versa, how applications could support users in contributing data and knowledge to broader, open data and knowledge networks.

Team: HuNI Virtual Lab

Country: Australia

Team Leader: Conal Tuohy

Team Members: Alex Hawker, Deb Verhoeven, Richard Rothwell, Kerry Kilner

The HuNI (Humanities Networked Infrastructure Virtual Lab) project @HuNIVL will integrate a number of important cultural datasets in Australia and align them to a common ontology, store the data in a linked data store store, and will also build what is termed a ‘Virtual Laboratory’ (VL). A VL is an online environment of tools and services to allow specialist researchers to come together to perform certain computational research tasks with the possibility of uncovering new insights and research into Australia’s cultural landscape.

The HuNI demonstrator the team want to empower the LODLAM with a means to extend current scholarly and collection data practices, using linked data, to support enhanced resource discovery. The power of data translation and ontology building can be put into the hands of the people through the development of digital methods, i.e. data captured in triples and linked that can then be pumped out into the linked data cloud. The approach defined in the HuNI demonstrator is designed to be reused to enable humanities researchers and information professionals in the GLAMs to become linked data “”makers”” and linked data service providers themselves.

Multiple scholarly humanities datasets will be harvested in, transformed, aggregated and linked around a common ontology: Australian Media History Database; Media Archives Project; AustLit; Australian Dictionary of Biography; Design and Art Australia Online; Australian Women’s Register; Encyclopedia of Australian Science; Colonial Australian Popular Fiction; Find and Connect Victoria; eMelbourne: the Encyclopedia of Melbourne; Chinese-Australia Historical Images in Australia; Reason in Revolt, Source Documents of Australian Radicalism; Guide to Australian Business Records; Australian Trade Unions Archive; Circus Oz Living Archive; Australian Film Institute Research Collection; PARADISEC; AusStage; AUSTLANG; bonza; and National Library of Australia Party Infrastructure.

The HuNI project is a partnership between 13 organisations and is led by Deakin University in Melbourne. Central to this partnership are the two lead development agencies – VeRSI and Intersect Australia – who are responsible for hosting Team HuNI and building the HuNI technical and ontological components through the successful execution of the project plan. The remaining ten partners (Macquarie University, University of Queensland, Australian National University, University of New South Wales, University of Melbourne, University of Sydney, RMIT, AIATSIS, Flinders University, University of Western Australia, and ACMI) are contributing as co-operators and co-developers by providing a significant cultural dataset and/or tool for integration into the HuNI Virtual Lab, and actively engaging in the HuNI community.

Team: Metayogi

Country: Canada

Team Leader: Karim Tharani

Team Members: Doug Macdonald, Rachel Heidecker

Metayogi is a design tool that allows teams to collaboratively build LOD applications that model, collect, showcase and share metadata from multiple sources to support thematic research, learning and discovery.

http://library.usask.ca/metayogi

Team: Linked Open Bibliographies

Country: United States

Team Leader: Kevin Clair

Team Members: Dawn Childress

Our team is looking into developing an approach for building and publishing linked open bibliographies, including tools for storing bibliographic data and annotations, and markup approaches for publishing these citations as linked open data.

Team: Aimfull Archivists

Country: United Kingdom

Team Leader: Geoff Browell

Team Members: Rory McNicholl

This project from the archive aggregation website, AIM25, which publishes the descriptions of more than 120 archive institutions in the London area, seeks to use the UKAT Linked Data service to facilitate the display of place-specific catalogue entries on the Historypin website. The UKAT dataset contains a wealth of place-specific data capable of being geo-referenced. The project is led by Geoff Browell, Archivist at King’s College London, and Rory McNicholl of the University of London Computer Centre.

Team: Free Your Metadata

Country: Belgium

Team Leader: Seth van Hooland

Team Members: Ruben Verborgh, Max De Wilde

“The Free Your Metadata project wants to leverage existing tools to generate more adoption of Linked Data principles amongst librarians, archivists and museum professionals. Academia and companies have generated tremendous progress the last ten years regarding standards and technologies. We want to focus on large-scale adoption of these standards and technologies by making them available for a non-technical audience.

The last two years, the team has been working hard to raise awareness regarding metadata cleaning and reconciliation, which are fundamental steps in order to prepare your metadata for exposure on the web. Having clean metadata linked to existing vocabularies is only the first half of the story. The second half involves developing a sustainable way of dissemination that is able to withstand several waves of technological change. Especially in these economic harsh times, we need to think proactively on how cultural institutions can minimize changes in how they provide access to their electronic resources. Architectures such as HTTP that conform to the REST architectural style employ the resources-and-representations model to minimize the architectural impact when responding to change. Concretely, while RDF can be a suitable internal representation, on today’s Web, HTML and JSON representations need to be available as well, and these lists of formats can (and will) change in the feature. By January 2013, we will roll out a large-scale case study (Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York) in which we’ll illustrate how a cultural institution can provide a sustainable access to multiple representations of its resources and metadata. This case-study will be thoroughly documented on freeyourmetadata.org and presented at conferences in the US and Europe.

Free Your Metadata is a scientific and a non-for-profit collaboration between Multimedia Lab (ELIS — Ghent University / iMinds) and MasTIC (Université Libre de Bruxelles).”