Linked Data

RightsStatements.org is a consortial initiative that focuses on providing a set of interoperable rights statements that make it easier for people to engage and reuse digital cultural heritage, particularly when provided by metadata aggregators. Since 2014, I have served as the co-chair of the Consortium’s Technical Working Group, which is responsible for maintaining the initiative’s vocabulary and infrastructure. We maintain our projects on GitHub.

I’ve been involved in modeling archival information as linked data since about 2009. Most recently, this includes work with the ARLIS/NA, RBMS, and SAA Joint Task Force on Art and Rare Materials BIBFRAME Ontology Extension. and Archives and Linked Data Interest Group.

If you don't, I'll make your data linkable.

The Society of American Archivists released the Thesaurus for Use in College and University Archives as an electronic publication this week. Specifically, it was issued as a series of PDF files. Is this data stored in some sort of structured format somewhere? If so, it's not available directly from the SAA site. There's no good reason why TUCUA shouldn't be converted to structured, linkable data, expressed using SKOS, the Simple Knowledge Organization System. It's not like I need another project, but I'm sure I could write some scraper to harvest the terms out of the PDF, and while I'm at it, I could write one to also harvest the Glossary of Archival Terminology. Someone, please stop me. I really don't need another project.

I'm really looking forward to next week's code4lib conference in Providence, despite my utter failure to complete or implement the project on which I am presenting. In particular, I'm really looking forward to the linked data preconference. Like some of my other fellow attendees, I've hammered out a FOAF file for the preconference already so that Ed Summers' combo FOAF crawler and attendee info web app.

This is what the sample output looks using my FOAF data. It's good to see we're well on our way to have an easily creatable sample type of RDF data for people to play with. At a bare minimum, you can create your FOAF data using FOAF-A-Matic and then edit it to add the assertions you need to get it to play nice with Ed's application. See you in Providence, but go FOAF yourself first.