radically open cultural heritage data on the web

this is the story of making some open linked* data

*disclaimer: it’s not very linked yet

we had a little project in York ...

to expose ‘The London Art World 1660-1735’ dataset - several years of history of

art research trawling primary and secondary sources of information about

into art sales, people, places and artworks all contained in spreadsheets

first we put the data on the web

simple database-driven web sitethis is about an art sale

artworld.york.ac.uk

ok, so it’s on the web, it has some links, it’s open, right? can I go now? ... not so fast, I’m not

done yet

how does a machine know that this is about an art

sale?

and these are links to info about people and places?

and how can someone get at this info and do

interesting things with it?like enrich it with information from

elsewhere?

linked open data... describing real-world things and the relationships between

them in a machine-readable way

in walks RDF: Resource (identifying resources on

the web) Description (and describing them) Framework (with a model

based on triples and graphs)

<someArtist> <occupied> <somePlace>

<someArtist> <painted> <somePainting>

<somePainting> <soldIn> <someSale>

<someSale> <happenedIn> <somePlace>

<someCatalogue> <describes> <someSale>

<someSaleItem> <soldFor> <somePrice>

<someBuyer> <purchased> <someSaleItem>

SUBJECT PREDICATE(aka relationship) OBJECT

all of these will be uris

this is not the rdf you are looking

for

RDF - all

abouttriples

an ontology is a standardized representation

of knowledge as a set of concepts within adomain, and the relationships between thoseconcepts. It can be used to reason about theentities within that domain, and may be used

to describe the domain (wikipedia)

or, put another way “a standard way of describing stufffor a given domain” (me)

we should either use terms from existing ontologies or create and publish our terms using

standard approaches

we created an event-driven ontology based on DUL (DOLCE Ultra Lite) and

LODE (Linked Open Events)

why?

because we wanted to create rich and specific data but ensure our data could still be understood in a generic and low

barrier way

dlib.york.ac.uk/ontologies

linking means making connections between our

data and others

we linked our people to viaf and some of our places to geonames ...

<ourPerson> <sameas> <viafPerson>

<ourPlace> <sameas> <geonamesPlace>

... a data consumer can start following this network of links

making data

image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kikishua/5451503709/

spreadsheet cleanup with scripting, a database and some Google refine action*

* google refine is very useful for dealing with messy spreadsheets + has an rdf plugin

a turtle* document for each of our 38,000 primary ‘entities’

saleperson

placeartworksource

stored in dlib.york.ac.uk and indexed in sindice.com** semantic search engine

* a format for creating rdf data ** try a search for sale domain:dlib.york.ac.uk

<http://dlib.york.ac.uk/data/place/34867>void:inDataset :OpenART;foaf:primaryTopic <http://dlib.york.ac.uk/id/place/34867>;rdf:type foaf:Document, dctype:Text .

<http://dlib.york.ac.uk/data/place/34867/turtle>void:inDataset <http://dlib.york.ac.uk/data/void.ttl#OpenART>;rdf:type foaf:Document, dctype:Text .

<http://dlib.york.ac.uk/data/place/34867/rdf>void:inDataset <http://dlib.york.ac.uk/data/void.ttl#OpenART>;rdf:type foaf:Document, dctype:Text .

<http://dlib.york.ac.uk/id/place/34867>mapping:hasResearchID "3.0548"^^<xsd:string>;rdfs:label "The Green Doors in the Little Piazza, Covent Garden; sale venue";vocupper:hasPlaceName "The Green Doors in the Little Piazza, Covent Garden";vocupper:hasBuildingName "The Green Doors";vocupper:hasStreetName "Little Piazza";vocupper:hasCity "London";vocupper:hasCounty "Greater London";vocupper:hasCountry "England";vochoa:hasContributorOfSource "Richard Stephens";

oactxt:venueOfSale <http://dlib.york.ac.uk/id/sale/34948>;

oactxt:venueOfSale <http://dlib.york.ac.uk/id/sale/34949>;oactxt:venueOfSale <http://dlib.york.ac.uk/id/sale/34950>;oactxt:venueOfSale <http://dlib.york.ac.uk/id/sale/34951>;oactxt:venueOfSale <http://dlib.york.ac.uk/id/sale/34952>;

vocupper:liesWithin [owl:sameas <http://www.geonames.org/6269131/>;rdf:type model:Place, vocupper:Country,

owl:NamedIndividual];

rdf:type model:Place, owl:NamedIndividual .

SUBJECT

OBJECT

PREDICATE

LINKED

DISCLAIMER

ours was one approach

it is very experimental and is imperfect in various ways

it showed that we could do linked data with an existing system

we want to do more

linked open data is leap of faith -

you have to expose data before people can

consume data

aim high -if we all put out high

quality rich data we can do high quality AND low

barrier things with it

we had a little project in York ...

there are 77981 results for ‘York’ in geonames

we had a little project in http://www.geonames.org/26333

52/ ...

credits

Richard Stephens: data creatorTate: data partners

Martin Dow: ontology devStephen Bayliss: ontology dev

Paul Young: data transformLOCAH project: inspiration

Jon Voss: lodlam guruUniversity of York: institutional support

JISC: funding

@julieallinsonjulie.allinson@york.ac.uk

http://tinyurl.com/dlib-openart #LODLAM #sxsw