Today I’m at the ‘Opening Data – Opening Doors’ event, which is both the first public event around the ‘Resource Discovery Task Force’ work, and also an opportunity to launch the JISC ‘Guide to Open Bibliographic Data’. The event is being live streamed at http://www.livestream.com/johnpopham
Following introduction from David Baker on the background of the RDTF and the ‘vision’ that came out of that work, now Laurence Chiles from the National Maritime Museum is talking about how they’ve approached publishing their collections and data on the web. The results are going live in the next few weeks.
Amongst a wide range of aims, they wanted to:
- Connect objects & records across varied collection – use linked data to enable connectivity between objects; help develop the story and relationships across the collections
- Give objects a growing online identity – permanent/stable home based on Object IDs
- To be conversational – let people use the data but then start/react to the conversation – if no one knows it’s there …
Actions they took:
Changed the criteria:
From ‘web ready’ to ‘not for web use’ – i.e. moved from a ‘not on web’ assumption, to a ‘on web unless specific decision not to’ assumption
Decided publishing data without images was OK
4 basic mandatory fields – (Title, ID, ?, ?)
Offer new ways to the data:
- OAI-PMH (for aggregation into Culture Grid and onwards to Europeana)
- OpenSearch
- XML
Used principles of linked data to link out of collections online:
- AEON (Archival retrieval service through their Archive catalogue)
- Cabinet (for print ordering service)
- WorldCat (links to publications)
- Plans to work with Wikimedia commons to enhance authoristy records
- Exposed bothe the SOLR API for ‘traditional’ search and the SPARQL end-point for lined data
- Promoted at Culture and History Hack days
Going forward want to:
- Promote a collaborative, conversational approch – e.g. ‘Help the NMM’ feature on all records
- Improve ‘on-gallery’ experiences
- Contiue to release more data and monitor – .e.g 1915 Crew lists