Linked Cultural Data
A profoundly exciting conversation with Richard Light yesterday has got my head buzzing about Linked Data and the real ambition of the next phase of development in cultural services.
Collections Trust is working on a project called the Grid, which is basically a next-generation evolution of the Peoples Network infrastructure which aggregates metadata from cultural institutions and serves it up to mass-market services such as Google, the BBC and - interestingly - anyone else who wants to consume it via an open API.
I spent some time this morning looking at Tim Berners-Lee’s TED presentation about Linked Data and two thoughts struck me:
1) The guy is way too young to be the inventor of the Internet and
2) The net result of the last generation of publicly-funded digitisation is not services, it’scritical mass. It’s about the sheer volume of more or less catalogued data forming part of the global collective effort to extrapolate meaning from connected datasets.
Richard is a genius, in many ways, and at least partly because he just does stuff. So, he’s been working with the Wordsworth Trust’s dataset (with the permission of Jeff Cowton, another hero of museum information world) to dismantle it and express it as RDF triples…(sound of roughly half the audience for this post disappearing).
It means that the dataset is transformed from being a database of records into a database of references - every concept in the system is assigned a unique URL, and every assertion it makes about the world is then available to other systems as a reference.
What does it mean in practice? I’m still working that out. On the one hand, it means that the culture sector steps out of the dark web and is able to contribute to the collective global fund of knowledge and meaning. On the other, it means that our organisations can connect to, consume and repurpose the collaborative efforts of countless others, all over the world. In the same way that DBPedia is different from Wikipedia, the next generation of cultural services seems to be based on openness and interconnectedness.
Could it be that we are finally seeing the point of interoperability?
April 17th, 2009 at 9:57 am
I’m going to do that depressingly too-regular geek thing of skirting over your main point but pointing out that TBL invented the World Wide Web, not the Internet
The WWW is an application that runs on the Internet, as is Email, FTP, IM, P2P etc.
I’ll read the rest of your post in more detail in a mo, but I just thought I’d point that out