Persistent identification: supporting digital humanities

Editor's Notes

• #3: PACKED – centre of expertise in digital heritage, situated in Brussels
• #5: An I will talk about our project, which is running for the museum sector
• #7: trustworthy sources of data on the web, which they can refer to in scientific research >>> but now, they find Wikipedia pages and pages addressing a non-scientific public AND not the website of the museum that owns that art work As an example I looked for the video art work ‘Magical World’ by the artist Johanna Billing
• #8: rich machine-readable data, which they can use for digital analysis and research >>> but now, they find plain html encoded pages with a limited amount of metadata This is an example of a website of museum SMAK about the artwork ‘Magical World’ by Johanna Billing
• #9: Museums on the other hand struggle with problems like: how to keep online available data up-to-date ? how to keep online available data complete/comprehensive? how to publish the rich data in a machine readable format? >>> what data structure and in which format do digital humanities researchers need? how to get online available data as high as possible in the ranking of search engines?
• #10: Solution for all these problems are complex and even not fully clear for us. But they all share one important technical requirement: Museums should gain control over the web address which points to the information about a work of art in their collection. Museum should aim for keeping this web address as persistent as possible in order to be thrustworthy source of information and to raise the internet traffic to the webaddres. Museums should consider themselves as online publishers of their own collection data. How does that work in practice?
• #11: Ss the solution is using persistent URI’s
• #12: Uri or a uniform resource identifier is a link that gives the name and the address of a thing on the internet
• #13: VIAF – virtual International Aythority File – a catalogue of authors and persons related to publications, based on data from libraries all over the world
• #15: But URI’s do not always work. The page of Plantin Moretus museum at Europeana looks like this now, because the links to the reproductions of the artworks changed recently…
• #16: To make sure that doesn’t happen, publishers should use Persistent URI’s… they ensure
• #17: EC ISA departement made a study about publishing documents online to share with citizens via persistent URIs
• #18: Persistent URIs are made by the publishing institution. So ISA developed a set of technical rules for creating persistent URI’s.
• #19: One should use I will try to clarify these 4 points
• #20: So the first point is use a good syntax for URIs. A good syntax consists out of 4 parts, logical and human readable -> easy for researchers to use
• #23: Just giving a P URI to an art work is not enough… there is often different data published about an art work on different websites (for example on a museum website, other thematical websites, exhibition website etc) to deal with that one should distinguish between ….
• #24: With this uri you refer to the realworld object – the artwork itself
• #27: So we uniquely identified online the art work itself, data and representation and made it possible to link it all to each other via the P URI refering to the artwork in the real world ----- Meeting Notes (12/06/14 01:22) ----- refering to the concept
• #29: There are a lot of different authorities on the web. For example a person you can identify via Freebase, VIAF, RKD…. Depends on what biografical, bibliografical or other data is collected in the authority about a person
• #30: Or for example you can identify the museum that owns the artwork itself via wikidata authority which contains information about the geografical coordinates
• #31: The last point is that …
• #32: Some technical stuff beyond museums? No –> project to prove that this works:
• #33: pursue ----- Meeting Notes (12/06/14 01:26) ----- object name (type of artwork)
• #36: So we had an artwork, published data an reproductions everywhere on the web, and plain html encoded webpages What we will have in the future is different data about an artwork linked to each other, and data enriched with other structured open format contextual information, like for example biografical and bibliografical information about an artist, links to archives, explanation what the term video art refers to, geografical location of the institute etc
• #37: The project aims at empowering museums to take responsibility for managing the online access to collection data and encourage them to step forward as an online publisher of their own knowledge base. This way, the project endorses the concepts of Open Data and Semantic Web in the art and cultural heritage sector and enables heritage institutions to provoke new ideas for digital humanities research inside and outside their organisation. making registration and publication of data online easier! Less information to be recorded in your own database scientific exposure: The museums become daily publishers of trustworthy data (not a catalogue on paper once q a year), More control and user statistics about the online use of collection data Improve accessible of research from museums themselves for external researchers Concrete future plans:: VKC datahub: open data repositories: collaboration between museums, publish data to use for research and education LUKAS representationshub: differentiated access to images of works of art