1. American Art Collaborative Linked Open Data
Initiative
Eleanor E. Fink
Eleanorfink@earthlink.net
americanartcollaborative.org/

2. Say Goodbye to
Static & Siloed
Data and Images

3. American Art Collaborative: Perspectives and Considerations 15 January 2015
Create
Effectively manage and
use your data
Extend
Share data seamlessly
among partners
Enrich
Integrate with broader
humanities and societal data

4. •“Next-Gen” data
structure standard
Card Catalog to Linked Data
card
catalog
• LCSH
• Dewey Decimal
Collections
RDb
RDb
• MARC, CIMI
• RDA, Z39.50
XML
• Schemas (e.g., LIDO,
Dublin Core, EAD)
RDF
• Ontologies (e.g.,
CIDOC, BIBFRAME)
Organization
Structure, math
Independence
Expressiveness

7. Smithsonian Institution
Chief, Office of Research Support
Curator, Peter A. Juley and Son Collection;
6 national art research databases: paintings,
sculpture, images, catalogs, etc. = 500,000
Records
Quest for Standards….

8. What Standards ?
Whose Standards?
Project
Institutional
National
Global
?

9. J. Paul Getty Trust
Founder, Getty Vocabulary Program
Director, Getty Information Institute
Built Getty Vocabularies, Object ID, CDWA,
NINCH, Digital Libraries, First Digital Gateway
Across L.A.…..BHA, Provenance Index, Census
of Antique Art and Architecture Known to the
Renaissance, etc.
Virtual Database
Domain collaboration and universal access to
images and art information……..

10. Linked Open Data
helps Museums and Art Institutions:
Collaborate
Improve Access to Art Information
Connect data across platforms, institutions, and
domains
Gain more visibility
Reach new audiences

11. What is Linked Open Data?
•It’s not a portal or an aggregate data base
•It’s distributed like the World Wide Web
•It’s a format used to code data that when
linked allows you to search across the sea of
data on the Web using that format
•Institutions take responsibility for their own
knowledge management and sharing strategies
•Other institutions can add knowledge about
your objects
more precisely………

12. Linked Open Data
•A method of publishing structured data so
that it can be interconnected and become
more useful.
•Uses a mark up language called RDF. When
combined with a domain ontology the
relationship between subject, predicate, and
object can be tagged explicitly.
•As a result when you are searching using LOD
you don’t get the “noise” or unrelated
information you get with online searching.

13. Linked Open Data
<subject> <predicate> <object>
using W3C standards (RDF)
+
Add Semantic glue
A domain Ontology like the CIDOC CRM
Precise links

14. A Google search for “winslow homer theft”
retrieves documents that users must read to
extract relevant information
information

15. There are 149 billion triples
And growing

16. Benefits of using Linked Open Data
•Data about a particular artist can be connected
across all museums and repositories using Linked
Open Data. Thus millions of people searching by
artist will discover who has what and where. It
will increase museum and research center
visibility.
•It will open up a window for discovering more
relationships among the works of art because it
will connect to hundreds of related works.

17. Benefits of using Linked Open Data
•By connecting concepts such as events, dates,
people, and places across all domains, it will
open a window to potentially finding new
information about a work of art. Thus it is a
boost to research leading to new discoveries.
•It’s a collaborative platform that can be used by
curators to organize exhibitions, by scholars to
engage in joint research or prepare publications,
by museums to deepen audience engagement (e.g.
the public can be invited to participate and help fill
in information working like Wikipedia.)

18. Benefits of using Linked Open Data
•Being able to connect the dots across different
institutions can lead to easier curriculum
development for distance learning (connecting
museum works to information in a local archive,
or to the Natural History Museum, etc.). It will
increase collaboration.

20. LOD cloud containing interlinked resources from a wide
variety of sources relevant to locating stolen or looted cultural
property

22. Linked Open Data is already making headway in
the commercial, communications, and publishing
worlds.
The New York Times, US Government, Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and
many others are implementing Linked Open Data.
In Europe the EU is building bridges across its
libraries, archives, and museums using Linked
Open Data (Europeana).

23. AAC
Consortium of US museums who have come
together to learn about and implement LOD
within their respective museums. AAC is
developing its LOD under a federated model
whereby each AAC member assumes
responsibility for updating and maintaining
its own data.

25. The American Art Collaborative Partners
Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Archives of American
Art, Autry National Center of the American West, Colby
College Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American
Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Thomas Gilcrease Institute of
American History and Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art,
National Museum of Wildlife Art, National Portrait Gallery,
Princeton University Art Museum, Smithsonian American Art
Museum, Walters Museum of Art, and Yale Center for British
Art

26. Grants from the Andrew W. Mellon
Foundation and a Leadership Grant from
the Institute of Museum and Library
Services

27. Road Map
• Convert data to LOD using the CIDOC CRM
• Link to the Getty Vocabularies as well as
contribute missing names to enhance the
vocabularies
• Implement an API and reader compliant with
the International Image Interoperability
Framework (IIIF) that will allow researchers to
compare and contrast AAC LOD

28. • Develop several open source tools
including a link curation tool and IIIF/CRM
translator
• Develop browse demonstration
• Open access
• Publish best practices and lessons
learned

29. Rationale
•Learn together as a collaborative
•Build a critical mass to explore and demo value
of LOD
•As primary holders of art objects and data AAC
members want to make sure LOD is accurate
•More precise results when searching(Semantic
Web)
•Build richer contexts for inquiry by integrating
data from different sources

30. •Interest in access across the partnership as
well as linking to other LOD nodes: providing
more knowledge than any single institution
•Cross domain searching as a window to the
world of knowledge
•Greater visibility; more outreach
•Collaborative platform potential (curator to
curator)

32. Work licensed under a Creative Commons license is
Governed by applicable copyright law
E.G.
•Freeing content globally without
restriction CC0
•Only with Attribution CCBY
•Attribution and non commercial CCBYNC
Creative Commons license

33. CIDOC CRM ontology
Expressive and event driven
82 classes and 263 properties including
relationships
Events
(e.g., creation, production, attribute assignment),
Immaterial things
(e.g., information objects, appellations, rights)
Material things
(e.g., actors, physical things, man-made objects)

35. • Until recently most museums recorded people,
places, and dates as static data items.
• Now the trend is toward describing these
categories as a series of events.
• Moving from description of objects to
describing events (CIDOC CRM) relationships.
• Historical perspective. Linked History
How has documentation changed?

36. Linked Data is here to stay
•“Next-Gen” data
structure standard
card
catalog
• LCSH
• Dewey Decimal
Collections
RDb
RDb
• MARC, CIMI
• RDA, Z39.50
XML
• Schemas (e.g., LIDO,
Dublin Core, EAD)
RDF
• Ontologies (e.g.,
CIDOC, BIBFRAME)
Organization
Structure, math
Independence
Expressiveness
Slide by Design for Context

37. American Art Collaborative: Perspectives and Considerations 15 January 2015
Create
Effectively manage and
use your data
Extend
Share data seamlessly
among partners
Enrich
Integrate with broader
humanities and societal data

38. Tear Down Data Silos
Provide Open Access

40. American Art Collaborative LOD

42. THANK YOU
americanartcollaborative.org/
Eleanorfink@earthlink.net