The Fourth International Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives and Museums (LODLAM) summit will be held in Venice, Italy, at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini June 28-29 , 2017.
LODLAM stands for Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives and Museums. Linked data is a combination of techniques, tools and web standards that enable the World Wide Web to evolve from a web of documents to a web of data. When applied to libraries, archives, and museums, linked data transforms the way we discover, analyze, and visualize cultural, scientific and government information.
The LODLAM Summit brings together thought leaders from around the world working in digital cultural heritage, eScience, and the digital humanities to debate, network and share their ideas, latest projects, hacking skills, data management methods, and to participate in the LODLAM Challenge.
Reflections on the 2017 LODLAM Summit are emerging, here are some already posted up on the web (let us know if there are others, and we’ll add them to this list).
Any of the 2017 Summit delegates that want to write a report up are invited to do so as a post on the 2017 Summit website.
My Report
To say the very least, I had an incredible time in Venice. By incredible I mean a time full of intellectual stimulation, practical concerns and logistics, able to see friends and colleagues from all over the world, and, in a city of such extraordinary beauty, culture, and history.
Once again I discovered how much I really love the world of semantics and informatics (see the session notes). What an extraordinary stroke of good fortune to get an international summit up and running and in such a beautiful setting at the Cini Foundation. Bellissima!
The LODLAM Summits have a special quality and it is a generosity of spirit and mind (and supporters). It is this special quality (and levels of informality in the way this community comes together) that makes my cup runneth over. Much has been gained by “doing” (for me). Here are my handful of insights and lessons learned as a first time facilitator, to offer back in.
Lessons Learned
Assume the best in people: If I could have a wish, it would have been to capture all of the delegates creating the open space by rearranging the chairs and then closing it. It was such a gift and a sight to behold.
Best laid plans: To quote from a kind email Rob Warren sent after the Summit that made me laugh “it’s a lot of thankless work and sometimes… well, the island starts flooding at dinner!” Many of you offered thanks to the organising committee in some way and gracefully offered constructive feedback.
Accepting change: We want to examine how we come together to share ideas, grow and collaborate: do better, maybe more or less, definitely do differently. Check out the session notes collated on community plan / future LODLAM for our discussion.
Leading lights: It is not possible for me to post on the Summit without reflecting on the people who have led (here’s looking at you Jon Voss) and are continuing to lead the way. Apart from all the nerdy brilliance evident in newbies and experienced curatorial, informatics and technical folks I want to shine light on other kinds of leadership skills that are evident. Those of you with the wisdom or life experience who know when to offer guidance, to stand up or back, be quiet or speak up, to give thanks, shrug off or expose problems, to have a stake or to take risks. Plenty of that kind of leadership was on show too and it was an inspiration.
The exhibition Ettore Sottsass, The Glass, explores the Italian designer’s complete glass production, consisting of close to 200 items from major private collections as well as objects from historical archives of the Venetian glassworks Sottsass worked in.
The exhibition Alighiero Boetti: Minimum/Maximum celebrates the 20th-century Italian artist with over twenty striking works selected for the first time according to format to produce a comparison of “minimum” and “maximum” in his most significant series. The show includes a special project by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Agata Boetti on the theme of the photocopy, entitled COLOUR = REALITY. B+W= ABSTRACTION (except for the zebras)
The exhibition, Us Silkscreeners… takes the story of the very first silkscreen paintings by Rauschenberg and Warhol as its point of departure, namely Rauschenberg’s Renascenceand Warhol’s Dollar Bills Series, both completed in 1962.
In the spring of that same year a meeting between the two artists took place, which marked the beginning of a new direction in photo transferring, that would not only impact the artist’s own career, but would also influence the art scene at large, thus, forming Rauschenberg and Warhol’s legacy. The exhibition, Late Series, presents two artworks from some of the most important later series by Rauschenberg, amongst other Borealis, Urban Bourbon, Scenarios and his last one: Runts. A common thread for all series is the image transfer, which started in 1962 and since got developed and refined in multiple ways.
New Media (Virtual Reality Art): Faurschou foundation presents new media works by the internationally acclaimed artists Paul McCarthy and Christian Lemmerz. Khora Contemporary, a platform solely dedicated to virtual art (VR) created as a bridge between artists and Virtual Reality developers, collaborated with Paul McCarthy and Christian Lemmerz, the predecessors within the field, to produce astonishing new media works.
Qwalala, a monumental outdoor installation by American artist Pae White, on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice.commissioned by LE STANZE DEL VETRO. The work by American artist Pae White consists of a curving wall made of 3,000 solid glass-bricks, each hand-cast in the Veneto region. At 75 metres long and 2.4 metres high, it occupies the entire area opposite LE STANZE DEL VETRO. The title of the piece, Qwalala, is a Native American Pomo word and references the meandering flow of the Gualala river in Northern California, which the work echoes in both its structure and layout.
Last but not least Michelangelo Pistoletto: One and One Makes Three, which features a large selection of works by the Arte Povera pioneer who is 84 this year. An exhibition conceived for the Basilica of San Giorgio Maggiore and for the adjoining spaces, the Sacristy, the Main Choir, the Sala del Capitolo and the Officina dell’Arte Spirituale.
Over the past two days the ~100 delegates of the 2017 LODLAM Summit listened to the final pitches from the five finalists of the Technical Challenge and voted on the winners for two prizes. Valentine Charles (Europeana) announced the two prize winners.
Grand Prize went to: DIVE+
Johan Oomen aka Invisible Man (Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision) & Valentine Charles (Europeana)
Eero Hyvönen (University of Helsinki and Aalto University) & Valentine Charles (Europeana)
Grand Prize – DIVE+ was awarded this USD$2,000 prize because they have demonstrated significant impact (a mix of social, cultural, and technical factors). All of the Summit sponsors provided the sponsorship for the prize and funds for the travel grants.
WarSampo was awarded USD$1,000 prize where making cultural heritage material openly available has been a core aspect of a linked open data project. Synaptica provided the sponsorship for the prize.
In each session at the Summit there will be a facilitator, a notetaker. A good idea if another delegate volunteers to keep time (timekeeper). Many hands make light work!
We will have a bulletin board onsite at Cini and online and invite delegates to update this as the sessions run. It’s at http://bit.ly/2sPCj3e
The session notes become the informal Summit proceedings and can be shared with the wider community, especially if actions, collaborations and exemplars arise from those discussions.
Are you new to Venice? Are you blasé from your flight filled with paper corrections, email drafts and funding proposals? Need something to keep busy with in the long dark period between tea time and dinner?
Meet fellow @lodlam attendees at Cantinone già Schiavi (address Dorsoduro 992 fondamenta Nani, 30123 Venice or 45.430945,12.3261018 for the hardcore) at 4PM on Tuesday the 28th. The venue is also (mis?)translated as Wine Cellars Already Slaves which should start a few conversations about Al translation. The venue is about 25mins by vaporetto / foot from the island of San Giorgio Maggiore.
Come and meet your fellow delegate, catch up with old friends and unwind before we get to work on Wednesday!
Empowering users–other researchers, citizen scholars, or the “crowd”–to annotate or create data is a low-cost way to expand datasets. There are countless applications for this ranging from transcription, translation, and metadata and OCR correction to the generation of a wide array of user-contributed content.
image by: opensource.com
There are quite disparate ways of engaging users in different types of content creation, however, and a number of concerns exist:
Quality control: Are there effective workflows for evaluating user-contributed content? Can we crowd-source quality control? How do we even keep spam out of our crowdsourcing tools?
Ethics: what are the ethical considerations associated with sourcing free labour in this way? What kind of disclosure regarding data use and reuse is required? What kind of credit is appropriate? Are there risks related to exposure and recirculation of data beyond the context of contribution?
Management: What are examples of effective interfaces? What workflows are required? How should provenance be tracked and made evident?
I’m hoping we can talk about the practicalities of this: use cases; examples of projects engaging citizen scholars or the public in LOD data production; and tools and interfaces for managing the process.
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.
Data sharing, aligning ontology, seamless data sharing across data silos: these are the promises of the semantic web. To date, we still do not have an operational theory of using linked open data tools for practical linking beyond abusing owl:sameAs statements (Halpin et al).
Are people really reusing other people’s ontologies and vocabularies or (re)creating their own? Do top-level ontologies really give you anything or are they table-top toys that do not scale to describing real world problems?
A review of the LOV website clearly shows that beyond core W3C vocabularies, little linkages are being made across vocabularies. Yet we know that this and more will be required if we expect data to scale. Ontologies are being implemented with OWL but is anyone actually using reasoning in production or are their ontologies just simple annotation databases?
This session is meant to swap stories about implementing vocabularies and sharing data in the field. Bring your coffee and tea and share your stories around the virtual triples campfire.
ORCID would like to improve their LOD implementation and at the same time move to a technology that is easier for their core tech team to maintain. We would like to propose a session that will examine the pros and cons of using a schema.org and JSON-LD based approach to representing researchers and their activities in the ORCID registry . A set of straw man representations will form the basis of a discussion on the various ways this could be achieved. We’re hoping that this session will help iron out the issues and result in something that is more useful to the community.
The existing ORCID RDF implementation was generously donated to our open source stack by Stian Soiland-Reyes and contains biographic information. However, it does not reference other entities and as the technologies used are not within our core competencies they are difficult for us to maintain and extend. We are hoping it’s possible to produce an enhanced schema.org representation that can be embedded within the registry pages and utilised by a more diverse set of users across multiple use cases. Examples include being consumed by simple web applications and search engines etc as well as being navigated by automated LOD agents.
The recent schema.org implementation from the Datacite DOI registrar will form a point of reference and examined to ensure that crosswalking between the two systems is as simple as possible. Outcomes from other LODLAM sessions discussing schema.org will also be included to ensure we’re on the same page.
This discussion will be fed back to the ORCID tech team for consideration.
The richness of Linked Open Data has yet to be exploited and the question is what tools can assist with consumption besides faceted search and basic graph visualizations? As we moved to a “create more triples” market to one of processing and proving the value of LOD for consumption, how can we maximize our benefits of the technology to do real work?
For instance, the Auckland Museum has implemented a tabletop interface for exploring its linked collection data to promote a unique interactive museum experience and engage the public in data curation (Click on the image for a youtube video).
We’re interested in similarly innovative tools and concepts for mobilizing linked data and the session would try and answer the following questions:
What tools are robust and usable outside their home environment?
What examples are there of natural language tools for SPARQL queries?
What tools work with haptic or VR interfaces?
How can we give users rich prospect on ontologies and datasets so that their scope, strengths, and gaps are made more apparent to users?
How can we really bring LOD alive?
We’re interested in seeing what is out there and brainstorming what is needed.
Bring your tools for informal demos, sketches or wireframes and get the creative juices flowing!
