Hollie Lubbock discusses open data and its uses in cultural institutions. She notes that open data, which is freely available and reusable, has been used by the NHS to find £200m in possible drug cost savings. Cultural institutions are also developing shared thesauri and APIs to make their collections data more open and linkable. The future may require open data for government funding. When museums share data using common standards, it enables new tools for cross-collection searching and collaboration across institutions.

1. Hollie Lubbock
UI design for open data
@hollielubbock
www.hollielubbock.co.uk

2. hello
@hollielubbock
— User experience / designer
— Many cultural institutions
— Museums, galleries some commercial

3. Back ground for some projects
— data as inspiration
— designing the data
— helping users see the possibilities of
data

4. What is open data?
— free to use
— ideally easy to reuse & remix
— available in an accessible format
— part of the larger semantic web
— Tim Berners Lee 5 star system
http://opendefinition.org/od/
http://theodi.org/guides/what-open-data

5. Use in the semantic web
The Semantic Web isn’t just about
putting data on the web. It is about
making links, so that a person or
machine can explore the web of data.
With linked data, when you have some
of it, you can find other, related, data.
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html

6. How can it be used?
£200m possible saving to nhs by
switching to a generic drug
http://theodi.org/blog/a-new-era-of-data-
innovation

7. £200m possible savings
— nhs is the National Health Service
— On one single type of medication
— Found by analyzing open data
— in 8 weeks
— many more savings possible
Mastodon C (ODI start up)
http://theodi.org/blog/a-new-era-of-data-
innovation

8. How can it be used?
Invisible Airs, YoHa
(ODI data as culture)
http://vimeo.com/32030340

9. How can it be used?
Invisible Airs, YoHa
(ODI data as culture)

10. Why visualization is important
Data skills will become more important
as data plays a larger part in our lives
— raw data isn’t easy to interpret
— maps, graphs etc. easier to digest

11. Visualization in history
Florence Nightingale: Causes of Mortality
infographic from 1858

12. So how is this working
in the cultural sector?
— common thesauri being developed
(cidoc crm)
— sharing collections data
— Tate (art gallery)
— Victoria & Albert museum
(uk design museum)
— developing Api’s
http://www.cidoc-crm.org
http://www.vam.ac.uk/api/qb/
https://github.com/tategallery/collection

13. The Future
— maybe a requirement for
government funding
— GDS have started this off in UK
https://gds.blog.gov.uk/

14. What happens when museums
get together and share?

15. Researchspace
— prototype
— tool for academics to collaborate
— cross collections searching
— common thesauri / taxonomy
— RDF triple store at the heart
http://www.researchspace.org/

16. How would we ideally like to search?
— search based on sentence structure

17. Visualization challenges
— defining the search term (freebase)

18. Visualization challenges
— helping the user learn the interface

19. Visualization challenges
— representing a complex SPARQL query

20. Visualization challenges
— multiple ways to filter

21. Demo...
http://vimeo.com/94547832

22. Data as a pulse of relevance / trends

23. Royal Shakespeare Company
— showing how Shakespeare is relevant
— data from ebay, flickr and twitter
— Twitter API change (not working now)
http://myshakespeare.rsc.org.uk/banquo/

24. Live data
— data stored for refernece

25. Helping users
— clear instructions to users

26. Graphing relevance
— highlights surges in interest

27. Filtering
— by type of play

28. Using open data as an enhancement

29. Victoria & Albert Museum
— world’s largest museum of decorative
arts and design,
— collection of over 4.5 million objects
— founded in 1852 and named after
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
http://www.vam.ac.uk/
http://www.othermedia.com/data/files/
othermedia-vawebsite-qa-5.pdf

30. Navigation
— reflected organisational structure
— not helpful for users
— is there a better way?

31. Using open data as an enhancement
— based on search
— templating on the fly
— uses semantic web to draw in
relevant topics from external sites
— exposed thesauri
http://www.vam.ac.uk/
http://www.othermedia.com/data/files/
othermedia-vawebsite-qa-5.pdf

32. The internal fight over the homepage

33. On the fly templating
— system cached for popular topics

34. Topic or Theme hubs

35. Enhancing the topic

36. @hollielubbock