Museum – Conal Tuohy's blog

Australian Society of Archivists 2016 conference #asalinks

Last week I participated in the 2016 conference of the Australian Society of Archivists, in Parramatta.

I was very impressed by the programme and the discussion. I thought I’d jot down a few notes here about just a few of the presentations that were most closely related to my own work. The presentations were all recorded, and as the ASA’s YouTube channel is updated with newly edited videos, I’ll be editing this post to include those videos.
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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.

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.

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Names in the Museum

My last blog post described an experimental Linked Open Data service I created, underpinned by Museum Victoria’s collection API. Mainly, I described the LOD service’s general framework, and explained how it worked in terms of data flow.

To recap briefly, the LOD service receives a request from a browser and in turn translates that request into one or more requests to the Museum Victoria API, interprets the result in terms of the CIDOC CRM, and returns the result to the browser. The LOD service does not have any data storage of its own; it’s purely an intermediary or proxy, like one of those real-time interpreters at the United Nations. I call this technique a “Linked Data proxy”.

I have a couple more blog posts to write about the experience. In this post, I’m going to write about how the Linked Data proxy deals with the issue of naming the various things which the Museum’s database contains.

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Linked Open Data built from a custom web API

I’ve spent a bit of time just recently poking at the new Web API of Museum Victoria Collections, and making a Linked Open Data service based on their API.

I’m writing this up as an example of one way — a relatively easy way — to publish Linked Data off the back of some existing API. I hope that some other libraries, archives, and museums with their own API will adopt this approach and start publishing their data in a standard Linked Data style, so it can be linked up with the wider web of data.

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