Linked Data and the OpenART project

Linked Data and the OpenART Project
Tate, 7th October 2011
Julie Allinson, University of York
Richard Stephens
Steve Baylissand
Martin Dow, Acuity Unlimited

“The term Linked Data refers to a set of best practices for publishing and connecting structured data on the Web.”
“the Semantic Web is the goal or end result… Linked Data provides the means to reach that goal”
From ‘Linked Data: The Story So Far’ - Heath, Bizer and Berners-Lee 2009

The goal of Linked Data is to enable people to share structured data on the Web as easily as they can share documents today.
Bizer/Cyganiak/Heath Linked Data Tutorial, linkeddata.org

Haven’t we been putting linked data on the web for years?
The web is full of data, yes, but structure in traditional web pages is largely ‘formatting’
And the ‘links’ are pretty unintelligent
Databases, search interfaces, XML etc are not really integrated into the web, just on it
Web 2.0 services tend to work against a fixed set of sources

links to galleries
links to exhibitions

Linked data
Linked data is about identifying the ‘real-world’ things we want to describe
and exposing rich information about these ‘things’
in the form of links
linked data applications operate on top of this unbound structured web of information
the www as one big database

RDF
RDF (Resource Description Framework) is a way of modelling data, conceptually (as graphs)
it links things, not just documents
and creates ‘typed’ links
allows us to say meaningful things about entities
and the relationships between them

Triples
Triples are the basis of RDF
Triples statements
Subject – Predicate - Object
Rather than
Displays
Painted
Links to
The
Snail
The
Snail
Gallery
Matisse
Web
Page
Web
Page

One more thing about triples …
If we want to do ‘linked’ data.
Each piece of the triple should be a link.
In web speak, that means a HTTP URI
A unique identifier
MAY be de-referenced to a location (a URL)
HTTP URIs are used to identify “real world” things
http://dbpedia.org/resource/Snail
http://viaf.org/viaf/42630086/#Matisse,_Henri,_1869-1954

Linked
The job of OpenART is to expose data
But linking is where it gets interesting
And where the (potential) value for linked data starts to show

Some Examples …

data.gov.uk
Officially launched 21st January 2010

Visualisation Prototype
Using Timemap –
Googlemaps and Simile
http://code.google.com/p/timemap/
Early stages with this
Will give location and ‘extent’ of archive.
Will link through to Archives Hub

SIG.MA

Visualising multiple data sources

For discussion?
Quality and Trust
Licensing
Control and Loss of Control
Hype Curve
Other approaches

OpenART : Open metadata for Art Research at the Tate
JISC funded
part of their Infrastructure for Resource Discovery Strand
6 months (March to July) – short!
£30k – cheap!
Building on the (much bigger) York’s History of Art Department and Tate’s Court Country City project funded by the AHRC.
The Digital Library are leading OpenART and providing technical development to Court Country City
Acuity Unlimited are working with us on OpenART.

Doing what?
designing and exposing linked open [meta]data for an important research dataset entitled "The London Art World 1660-1735", created as part of the AHRC funded Court, Country, City: British Art 1660 – 1735 project

And again, doing what?
‘The London Art World 1660-1735’ is set of spreadsheets, the result of several years research into Sources (sale catalogues, newspaper adverts) of information about Sales, People, and Places (and the things being sold)from the period
The Digital Library is already helping put this information on the web.
OpenART is extending this to create ‘linked open data’.

Snapshot from the Court Country City Web site

OpenART - in brief
Take the spreadsheets
Anaylse them and model into an ontology
Decide how to create the linked data and how to expose it to the web
Experiment a bit
Test and validate the ontology
Create the data and expose

Describing things with ontologies
an ontology is a standardized representation of knowledge as a set of concepts within a domain, and the relationships between those concepts. It can be used to reason about the entities within that domain, and may be used to describe the domain (wikipedia)
or, put another way “a way of describing things in a way other people/machines can understand” (me)

There are many ontologies out there
Dublin Core is a simple ontology for describing web resources
Geonames describes places
For OpenART we have used two core event-based ontologies
Dolce Ultra-lite
Linked events (LODE)
and have extended these for the domain

Example!
Much of the OpenART data set is about art sales, which are ‘events’
Linked Events Ontology has a class for ‘Event’
Which we have specialized to create an OpenART class for ‘Sale’
DUL has a class for ‘Social Agent’ (or person)
Which is a superclass for our term ‘Organiser’

Lost yet?
What this means is that we can describe our dataset for a very narrow domain (people researching the art market)
But it can be generalised and understood much more widely
Because our narrow classes are members of broader, more general classes used in standard ontologies

Example (again)!
Linked Events Ontology has a class for ‘Event’
Which we have specialized to create an OpenART class for ‘Sale’
Someone only looking for ‘art sales’ in 1670 can answer their research question
Someone looking for ‘events’ in 1670 could infer from our ‘Sale’ class that these sales are also events

OpenART output
Unique identifiers for the primary entities (Sale, Source, Person, Place, and Artwork)
RDF/XML (and probably ttl) documents representing each primary entity
RDF/A embedded in the CCC web site
Owl:sameas statements for personal names and VIAF

Lessons learnt
Ontology development is hard work and needs sustaining and a community
Linked data is simple in principle, but in application needs expertise and commitment
The original data is semi-structured and this needs clean-up to fit the precision of the ontology

Final thoughts
I believe there is a lot that could be done with open and linked data, by institutions
… not least efficiencies, adding-value to local information, information sharing and resource discovery …
Contact Julie Allinson julie.allinson@york.ac.uk
http://tinyurl.com/dlib-openart -- http://yorkdl.wordpress.com/
(thanks to Adrian Stevenson for some of the slides;
cover image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bostonjal/5280851979/)

Linked Data and the OpenART project

by Julie Allinson on Oct 08, 2011

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Linked Data and the OpenART project Presentation Transcript