A practitioner’s guide to linked data for cultural heritage Jacco van Ossenbruggen 10m for 10y lessons learned from MultimediaN, PrestoPrime, EuropeanaConnect, COMMIT, …

Linked data? LD is a recipe to: – make access to data as easy as access to web pages – make linking data as easy as linking web pages how? copy the recipe for web pages: – reuse URIs for data identifiers (cool URIs don’t change) – reuse HTTP for data transport – reuse HTML RDF as a standard data model comes in many syntax flavours: XML, N3, Turtle, RDFa, …

LD is infrastructure LD is a means to an end, not a goal in itself So what is your goal? – Who are your users? – What do they need? – Why are your currently not providing this? – If you would provide it, would using linked data make your life easier? your users happier?

Using and creating linked data reusing relevant LD made by other – good idea! (identify which datasets) publish generated data as LD so others can use it outside your platform – good idea! (linked to which existing datasets?) use PIDs even if you don’t use LD yet – good idea! (thanks for your handles!) creating your own archive ontology – mmm… probably: not, unless

LD and the crowd Understand which problem you are solving – the part machines excel vs the part humans do better – understand the incentives of your users go to the user if the user doesn’t come to you – data is always enriched, never changed original material should remain untouched and always available