Linked Open Data Visualisation at #GLAMVR16

On Thursday last week I flew to Perth, in Western Australia, to speak at an event at Curtin University on visualisation of cultural heritage. Erik Champion, Professor of Cultural Visualisation, who organised the event, had asked me to talk about digital heritage collections and Linked Open Data (“LOD”).

The one-day event was entitled “GLAM VR: talks on Digital heritage, scholarly making & experiential media”, and combined presentations and workshops on cultural heritage data (GLAM = Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) with advanced visualisation technology (VR = Virtual Reality).

The venue was the Curtin HIVE (Hub for Immersive Visualisation and eResearch); a really impressive visualisation facility at Curtin University, with huge screens and panoramic and 3d displays.

There were about 50 people in attendance, and there would have been over a dozen different presenters, covering a lot of different topics, though with common threads linking them together. I really enjoyed the experience, and learned a lot. I won’t go into the detail of the other presentations, here, but quite a few people were live-tweeting, and I’ve collected most of the Twitter stream from the day into a Storify story, which is well worth a read and following up.
Continue reading Linked Open Data Visualisation at #GLAMVR16

Bridging the conceptual gap: Museum Victoria’s collections API and the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model

A Museum Victoria LOD graph about a teacup, shown using the LODLive visualizer.
A Museum Victoria LOD graph about a teacup, shown using the LODLive visualizer.
This is the third in a series of posts about an experimental Linked Open Data (LOD) publication based on the web API of Museum Victoria.

The first post gave an introduction and overview of the architecture of the publication software, and the second dealt quite specifically with how names and identifiers work in the LOD publication software.

In this post I’ll cover how the publication software takes the data published by Museum Victoria’s API and reshapes it to fit a common conceptual model for museum data, the “Conceptual Reference Model” published by the documentation committee of the Internal Council of Museums. I’m not going to exhaustively describe the translation process (you can read the source code if you want the full story), but I’ll include examples to illustrate the typical issues that arise in such a translation.

Continue reading Bridging the conceptual gap: Museum Victoria’s collections API and the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model