In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Matthias Samwald
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes
Rather than trying to do a rapid expansion over the whole web through
very light-weight, loose RDFization of all kinds of data, it might be
more rewarding to focus on creating rich, relatively consistent and
interoperable RDF/OWL representations of the information resources that
matter the most. Of course, this is not an either-or decision, as both
processes (the improvement in quality and the increase in quantity)
will happen in parallel. But I think that quality should have higher
priority than quantity, even if it might be harder to, uhm, quantify quality.
This is the sort of issue I am trying to get my head around in relation
to my particular area of interest: the museums community. I'm trying to
form a view on what museum collections information systems could
contribute to the Linked Data effort, and my current thinking is
"objects in a historical context".
I've had a go at putting up one museum's 60,000 objects as
not-very-linked-data, see e.g.:
http://collections.wordsworth.org.uk/object/rdf/GRMDC.C104.15
which gives an idea of the sort of information that might be present
(for Fine Art materials, anyway).
One no-brainer is that this sort of exercise allows museums to assign
persistent URIs to their own objects, as I have done here.
Another obvious conclusion is that the museum community ought to get its
act together and agree on a vocabulary/ontology for the predicates in
these object descriptions. I'm currently using DBpedia properties, but
there are frameworks like the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model which
might serve better.
After that it all gets a bit hazy.
I've made a hook-up to Geonames if there is an "exact match" on the
place name in the data (which is done dynamically in the XSLT transform
which generates the RDF). I could, in principle, go to resources like
the Getty AAT for techniques, etc., as and when it has an API which
allows me to query it and get XML back.
However, my biggest query is about people - in a museum/historical
context, you're talking about all the people who ever lived, whether
famous or not. I could invent URIs for each person mentioned in the
Wordsworth Trust data, and publish those, but then they would be locked
into a single silo with no prospect of interoperability with any other
museum's personal data. Mapping names across thousands of museum triple
stores is not a scalable option.
So ... is there a case for "deadpeople.org", a site which does for
historical people what Geonames does for place names? ("dead" = "no
data protection issues": I'm not just being macabre.) The site should
expect a constant flood of new people (and should issue a unique URI for
each as it creates the central record), but should also allow queries
against existing entries, so that the matching process can happen on a
case-by-case basis in a central place, rather than being done after the
event.
Richard Light
--
Richard Light
