More and more LAM institutions are publishing their collection data as linked data. It is common practice to link to well known entitities for places, periods, people, concepts. This creates interesting opportunities for integrating data from different sources and build relevant cross-domain services for users. But to do so it still seems necessary to aggregate link data dumps into central repositories.
For the Dutch Digital Heritage Network we are investigating the possibilities for building cross-domain users services by registering only backlinks to the source data instead of aggregating the full datasets. Using lightweight protocols (f.e. Linked Data Fragments, Webmention, Linked Data Notifications) we hope to realize a distributed digital heritage network where the major part of the data lives as linked data at the institutions. By registering backlinks instead of aggregating linked data we think true browsable linked data should be possible. I look forward to exchange ideas with you about this approach.
Read our whitepaper for a high-level overview of our approach.