‘GLAMorous’ LOD and ResearchSpace

IntroductionDr. Barry Norton,

Development Manager, ResearchSpace* The British Museum

* supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam May 2014

Agenda• Ten years… where’s the ‘Semantic Web’?

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• OK, but… isn’t this just about the Web?

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• If we give away our precious data, won’t people make untrue claims?

Semantic Web?• 13 years since this article

• 13 years ago, a young PhD student is glamorised by meeting TimBL

• 8 years ago, teaching alongside Jim… to European PhD students

• 2 years ago teaching in Berkeley every Summer, switch to training BBC, Wiley, British Museum…

Wait… what?

… what?

… what?

“40% decline in traffic when the structured data was broken”

BBC

What changed?• Stopped trying to build Semantic Web as precursor

to people wanting to use it

• Starting putting data out there so people could incrementally build clever things

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Two datasets

http://collection.britishmuseum.org http://linkedbrainz.org

Back to the Web

but…

Back to the Web

More on the Web!

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• This is (was?) the wrong picture

Two large graphs

• Goo

Google Knowledge Graph disambiguates search entities and provides data

Wikidata disambiguates Wikipedia entities and provides data

Is this just about the Web?• Can now include events

and people as Linked Data in email

• Import into (different) calendar

• Can announce music-related events in Linked Data and calendar

• Looking for richer model for music for schema.org

This is now about systems integration

Richer models!

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rich enough model to talk about Yale’s Hadleigh Castle and relationship to ours

Untrue claims?• For years a (naive) objection to Linked Data has

been:

• “If I publish my data and give my things identifiers (URIs), won’t people make untrue claims?”

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<http://collection.britishmuseum.org/id/object/YCA62958> crm:P52_has_current_owner

<http://semanticweb.org/id/Barry_Norton>

ResearchSpace• a reusable set of Linked Data-based components, making up

• a platform that allows researchers to make claims (additions and changes to GLAM data) -

• that preserves and aggregates canonical data across Museums (LAMs),

• attributes claims,

• records arguments based on

• provenanced data annotation,

• image annotation

• forum-based discussion with explicit annotation

• will allow inference over claims

RS Search

RS Data Annotation

RS Image Annotation

RS ‘Data Basket’

RS Dashboard

RS (Conjunctive) Search

Fundamental Relationships