Montreal, Canada 19-20 June 2013
Join us to unwind after the Summit at the terrasse café of the Musee du Cinema / Cinematheque Quebecois, which is just one block away. They have wonderful food and an assortment of beers and wine for purchase, and it’s a perfect day to unwind outside.
Just walk past Rue Saint-Denis and it will be on your right–kind of an alley. Here are walking directions just in case.
There should be plenty of room, feel free to invite friends.
Google Street View:
Here’s a Google Spreadsheet for putting in links, citations, other resources that you shared or learned about at the LODLAM Summit and that would be useful for others. I’ll plug in all the dork shorts, but need help with the links you used.
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 browser as DBpedia), but looking forward to getting better tools from you. So check it out, here is the page for John Singer Sargent.
This afternoon we are having the final round of consideration for the LODLAM Challenge.
Here are the final teams and their projects:
Tune into the live stream for the show later this afternoon
This has probably been tweeted, but here’s a live(ish) link to the sessions.
If you have flown in a day early for the Summit and have an interest in the upcoming centenary of the Great War that is around the corner, join us for dinner at Kam Fung tonight in Chinatown at 7PM for Linked Data, the Great War and … chinese food. (Map here)
(note: just a few spaces left – do get in touch with me if you are planning on coming. )
A few linked open data projects about the topic, including the New Zealand WW1 Linked Open Data Project, The Muninn WW1 Project, Out of the Trenches , Europeana and the SeCo group Timeline and History of World War I.
If we are serious about linked open data, we should look at ways of automating the linking of our data-sets in order to benefit from each others connections. My own topics of interest are going to be distributed name authorities and GIS information about the war. Given the widespread availability of British trench map coordinates and new sources of historical GIS information systems such as the Open Historical Map, there is plenty of low hanging fruit for us to work on.
If you can’t make the dinner, I’m proposing a session on the First World War on Thursday the 20th during the morning session… As well as on on naval / ocean and historical mapping data.
The CIDOC CRM is a compact top-level (conceptual) ontology that is appropriate for cultural heritage, historic discourse, archaeology. It supports generic description of cultural artifacts, people, places, sites, related events (e.g. creation, acquisition, finding, curation, conservation), cultural periods. It is standardized as ISO 21127:2006, but undergoes continuing development.
CRM is at the heart of the ResearchSpace project (http://www.researchspace.org/), a web-based collaborative system for art research, based on LOD and CRM. ResearchSpace is funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, run by the British Museum, software development by Ontotext. The relevance of CRM to CH research discourse is described by Martin Doerr here: http://www.researchspace.org/researchspace-concepts/technological-choices-of-the-researchspace-project. A recent blog by Dominic Oldman and Martin Doerr compares CRM to other aggregation ontologies: http://www.oldman.me.uk/blog/costsofculturalheritage/
Ontotext helped the British Museum to develop its mapping to CIDOC CRM, and Best Practice guidelines that other museums can use. Ontotext has gained strong experience with CRM and is active on the CRM Special Interest Group (CRM SIG). We promote CRM extensions and corrections that facilitate real interoperability and federation between collections of different institutions.
Two relevant papers by Vladimir Alexiev: http://www.ontotext.com/publications/2012#CRM-FR-search and http://www.ontotext.com/publications/2012#CRM-Properties. A brief presentation about Ontotext and ResearchSpace: http://www.slideshare.net/valexiev1/research-space-vre-based-on-cidoc-crm.
More info about Ontotext’s CH projects: http://lodlam.net/members/vladimiralexiev/profile, http://www.ontotext.com/Libraries_and_Archives
Ontotext organizes the workshop Practical Experiences with CIDOC CRM and its Extensions (CRMEX 2013, http://www.ontotext.com/CRMEX) in conjunction with the Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL 2013) conference on 26 September 2013 in Malta.
This session can start with an intro to CIDOC CRM, followed by discussion of its relevance for CH projects.
I am currently leading a project to publish all four Getty Vocabularies as LOD. The four Getty Vocabularies are: the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT)®, the Union List of Artist Names (ULAN)®, the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names TGN)®, and the Cultural Objects Name Authority (CONA)™. We are on track to start with AAT in July of this year. We will then move on to TGN, ULAN and finally CONA. Here is a PDF version of the most current flier – vocab_lod_flier
I am also interested in advice from the LODLAM community on what it takes to build and maintain a successful community of consumers of LOD versions of AAT, TGN, ULAN and CONA. Some of the discussions that would be helpful to us are:
Linked Data provides us with an incredible opportunity to re-think how we approach sharing information about LAM collections. However, these opportunities are also fraught with danger and important challenges that we must face. Translating existing standards into compliant Linked Data will take more than just cross-walking terms with similar meanings, it also means mapping between conceptual models and ontologies. Linked Data also provides us new opportunities to mix models and vocabularies in ways that we haven’t been able to do before. How can we take better advantage of these opportunities?
Ultimately, creating Linked Data standards and practices is a set of design problems that we are all engaged in. Elizabeth Churchill has called for “Data Aware Design” and the need to bring human-computer interaction methods to bear on these problems. At the Summit I will be presenting a Dork Short about a new site that I’m launching to do just this. LODLAM Patterns will identify Linked Data design patterns (which I’m calling representation patterns) for cultural heritage resources. The idea is to identify common problems that we are trying to solve and link them to the solutions that are available across the many, many standards for describing LAM resources. My goal is to create a resource that will spur discussions focused on problems/solutions, provide newcomers a way to navigate the LOD standards universe, and a pedagogical tool to teach “design-thinking” for Linked Data.
Participate by signing up at http://lodlampatterns.org or follow along @lodlamp or #lodlamp.
It’s just one week from the LODLAM Summit, and we’re so thrilled you’re going to be joining us for an amazing few days in Montreal this summer.
Here are some details to keep in mind, please read through them.
1. This time is yours to do with as you like. Aside from the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants Dork Shorts on the 19th, there are no formal presentations, just sessions that we come up with ourselves, so there’s no need to cram on a presentation on the plane on the way. Come well rested and ready to dig in. Some folks have started to share some session ideas–feel free to do so on the blog at http://summit2013.lodlam.net. You can sign up to give a 2 minute “Dork Short” presentation on the 19th, but we’ll tell you more about that then.
2. If you’d like to learn more about your fellow delegates, have a look at the Participants list on the blog, which is *almost* up to date. Note that there is one list by names, and another by affiliation. The names gives you links to full bio info. You can take my word for it, it’s an amazing group of people.
3. Dietary constraints or any other needs? We’ll be providing lunch both days of the Summit and we’re hoping to be able to have plenty of options to cover all kinds of dietary needs and access and transportation. Please take a moment to fill out this form though, so we can be sure.
4. 8am doors, 9am start. Because you’re VIPs, we’ll have a special, before-library-hours entrance for you. Please use the side entrance on Berri street (walk north on Berri from de Maisonneuve). Registration table will be right by this door. We’ll have coffee and pastries starting at 8am, and we’ll be starting the program at 9am sharp.
5. Where it’s at. Check out the map on the about page for hotel and event locations. Our local hosts have lined up an amazing evening terrace reception overlooking Les FrancoFolie de Montréal festival, an event which is happening all week.
6. Bring your own Lanyards (BYOL). I know you have 50 of them in a drawer, bring your favorite one to hang your nametag on! Or we’ll have some you can choose from.
See you soon!
Your LODLAM Summit organizing committee