persistent identification: supporting digital humanities

● 2005: a not-for-profit organisation founded by S.M.A.K., Argos, M HKA and MDD and focussed on the preservation of audiovisual arts

● 2011: ‘Centre of Expertise in Digital Heritage’: development and dissemination of knowledge on and expertise in the digitisation of cultural heritage

● Focus on all aspects of the digitisation process: creation, cataloguing, storage, sharing, exchange and reuse of digital heritage content

● Flemish projects: CEST, Scoremodel Digital Sustainability, TRACKS, VIAA, opencultuurdata.be, Persistent Identification

● European projects: ATHENA, ATHENAplus, PREFORMA, Europeana Space, DCA, Linked Heritage

● Erfgoedstats | SODA | SIP creator

● packed.be | scart.be | projectcest.be | scoremodel.org | projecttracks.org

PERSISTENT IDENTIFICATION:

MAKING DIGITAL HUMANITIES RESEARCH

EASIER

Alina Saenko | PACKED vzw

13.06.2014

4

CONTENTS

The problem: How to lead digital humanities researchers to rich and trustworthy museum data?

The solution: Persistent identification of data as a technical requirement, making DH research possible

The project: Museum sector

THE PROBLEM

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RESEARCHERS LOOK FOR

- trustworthy data from a source they can refer to, but…

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RESEARCHERS LOOK FOR

- rich machine-readable data, which they can use for digital analysis and research, but…   

8

MUSEUMS STRUGGLE

- 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?  - how to get online available data as high as possible in

the ranking of search engines?  

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IS THERE A SOLUTION?

Complex...

But 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 become a trustworthy source of information and to increase the internet traffic to the web address.

Museums should consider themselves as online publishers of their own collection data.

How does that work in practice?

THE SOLUTION:

PERSISTENT URIS

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WHAT IS AN URI?

1. make things and data accessible via the web  

 http://www.smak.be/

collectie_kunstenaar.php?la=en&id=&i=0&t=&tid=&y=&l=b&kunstenaar_id=1608&kunstwerk_id=1490

http://www.smak.be/collectie_afbeeldingen/

billing.jpg

12

WHAT IS AN URI?

2. uniquely identify things on the web  

 Johanna Billing:

http://viaf.org/viaf/120189360

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WHAT IS AN URI?

3. link different things on the web to each other  

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PERSISTENT URI’S ENSURE:

stability and accessibility of published data over time

high ranking in search engines because they are human-readable and do not change

enrichment of data via external authorities because they are deliberately shared with others

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17

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HOW TO IMPLEMENT PERSISTENT URIS FOR WORKS OF ART?

- Use a good syntax

- Distinguish between work, data and representation

- Reuse existing persistent URIs

- Act as publisher

GOOD SYNTAX:

http://[domain]/ mandatory

[type object]/ optional

[type document]/ optional

[identification number] mandatory

GOOD SYNTAX:

http://smak.be/collection/

work/id/

A256

NOT A GOOD SYNTAX:

http://www.smak.be/collectie_kunstenaar.php?la=en&id=&i=0&t=&tid=&y=&l=b&kunstenaar_i

d=1608&kunstwerk_id=1490

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Distinguish between art work, data and representation

WorkIn collection A

Data B

Data A

Data C …

Representation A

ART WORK:

http://smak.be/collection/

work/id/

A256

DATA: http://smak.be/collection/

work/data/A256

REPRESENTATION: http://smak.be/collection/

work/representation/

A256

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WORK, DATA & REPRESENTATION

Workhttp://

smak.be/collection/work/

id/A256

Data B

http://museuminzicht.

be/collection/work/data/

A256

Data A

http://smak.be/collection/work/data/

A256

Data C

http://museuminzicht.be/collection/

work/data/A256

…

Representation Ahttp://

smak.be/collection/work/representation/

A256

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Reuse existing persistent URIs

Use external authorities for contextual data (institute, artist, date, object name), because:

stuff that is not managed by the museum, probably already has an identifier somewhere else

they may contain contextual information that the museum doesn’t have yet

often available as structured data in an open format support of the Semantic Web idea

ARTIST – JOHANNA BILLING

RKDartists:http://explore.rkd.nl/explore/artists/26958

Freebase:https://

www.freebase.com/m/0fn5hr

VIAF:http://viaf.org/viaf/

120189360

INSTITUTION - SMAKWIKIdata:

http://www.wikidata.org/

wiki/Q1540707

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Act as publisher

Persistency can only be ensured by virtue of the publisher of the data. Therefore, museums should take up this responsibility in order to make digital humanities research based on their data possible.

THE PROJECT

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PERSISTENT IDENTIFICATION PROJECT

10 fine arts and contemporary art museums -> 10 data sets Bottom-up approach Deals with a lot of technical and practical questions Works with data exports from our partners Adds new persistent URIs next to existing data Identifies and links 7 entities in 10 data sets: art work, data,

representation, institute, date, artist, object name

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OPEN REFINE

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EXPECTED RESULTS

- show improved retrieval and enrichment in a demonstrator application

- the new PIDs and the PIDs from external authorities integrated in the collection data

- future websites with linked and enriched data (researches get more contextual information, than museums have)

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Data

Representation

Data

Artwork

Representation

Data

BENEFITS FOR MUSEUMS

makes registration and online publication of data easier! scientific exposure more control and user statistics about the online use of

collection data improves accessibility of internal researches for external

audience

Concrete future plans: VKC data hub: open data repositories LUKAS representations hub: access to images of works of art

BENEFITS DIGITAL HUMANITIES

the data published by museums are high in ranking (easier to find for researchers)

behind the links there is trustworthy information

the data are rich in contextual info

museum as a switchboard between different data sources

THANK YOU!ALINA@PACKED.BE