1. Indigenous knowledge systems and linked data
I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners on the land on which we meet and pay my respects to elders past and present.
The intention is to talk about some of the challenges experienced by information professionals in providing access to Indigenous cultural materials.
Some of the things we will look at include:
A definition of Indigenous knowledge
The imperatives to following cultural protocols
And Incorporating culturally respectful terms with linked data technologies
Jodie Dowd and Jenny Wood
AIATSIS Collections

2. The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS)
Books, pamphlets, serials Rare books Manuscripts
The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies is located in Canberra, on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin.
For more than 50 years, AIATSIS has promoted understanding of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures and heritage through supporting research, collecting materials and caring for and making accessible its dynamic and diverse collection.
A large collection of published and unpublished and unique material is held in our stacks and vaults consisting of over a million items. The collections include print and audiovisual material, personal and organisational records and reflect the diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australia
The AIATSIS Act was amended in 2016 to refocus the Institute’s core activities on collecting, preserving and providing access to our national collection.
Photographs Audio recordings Moving images

3. Indigenous knowledge
“Indigenous knowledge is the local knowledge that is unique to a culture or society. This knowledge is passed from generation to generation, usually by word of mouth and cultural rituals”
The United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO)
A UNESCO definition is that “Indigenous knowledge is the local knowledge that is unique to a culture or society. This knowledge is passed from generation to generation, usually by word of mouth and cultural rituals.”
Indigenous peoples have a wealth of intergenerational cultural knowledge that manifests in both intangible forms and material culture. This includes traditional knowledge and cultural expressions, oral traditions, dance, language, medicine and resources such as tools and artworks.
Indigenous societies have a great many descriptive categories of the natural world. Their traditional knowledge cannot be separated from country, cultural practices, and the relations between the individual or community and the natural world.
It is important to note that cultural meaning and understanding may be lost when interpreted in a different context, such as the Eurocentric classification systems in libraries.

4. Indigenous knowledge systems are different to western systems
“the recognition of traditional knowledge rights will require coordinated systems that allow knowledge holders, intellectual property owners, creators and users to find a balance between sharing knowledge and cultural rights management.”
Lawyer and leader in discussions of Indigenous Cultural Intellectual Property, Murri and Torres Strait Islander woman Terri Janke
Although collections within libraries and archives are a Western idea, Indigenous people have been able to connect with the knowledge contained within the records to learn or revive elements of their culture.
Are Eurocentric classification systems the best way to represent Indigenous knowledge ? No. Indigenous knowledge systems are quite different to western systems. 
Indigenous knowledge also includes differing levels of cultural knowledge. These levels of knowledge and the accompanying access conditions may vary depending on the nature of the item – is it secret or sacred, culturally sensitive, or gender specific? Can that knowledge be shared with others not belonging to the Indigenous community?
Lawyer and leader in discussions of Indigenous Cultural Intellectual Property, Murri and Torres Strait Islander woman Terri Janke suggests that “the recognition of traditional knowledge rights will require coordinated systems that allow knowledge holders, intellectual property owners, creators and users to find a balance between sharing knowledge and cultural rights management.”
Collaboration with Indigenous people in working towards inclusive solutions may be the way forward.

5. How does AIATSIS follow protocols?
The Guidelines for Ethical Research in Australian Indigenous Studies
The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Library, Information and Resource Network (ATSILIRN) Protocols
The AIATSIS Access and Use Policy
Pathways, the AIATSIS thesauri
How does AIATSIS follow protocols to share content?
AIATSIS created the guidelines for Ethical Research in Australian Indigenous Studies. These guidelines include rights, recognition and respect as well as consultation, collaboration and partnership. This is to ensure that ethical processes are followed when conducting research with and about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.
AIATSIS uses western mechanisms to respect and protect Indigenous knowledge contained within our collection materials and to help people locate the knowledge in our collection.
AIATSIS endorses the use of The ATSILIRN Protocols. The protocols are a guide for libraries and archives on good practice for those working with materials with Australian Indigenous content and acknowledge the moral right of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in being the owners of their knowledge.
Our legislation requires us to consider appropriate access to our collection material. Our Access and Use Policy explains how AIATSIS provides access to and use of material in its collections within a framework of Australian Law, the AIATSIS Act and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural sensitivities.
The Pathways thesauri is a set of descriptors used for subjects relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander studies, placenames, language groups and people. Providing culturally appropriate terms in the thesauri is part of our work to make searching for collection items in the AIATSIS catalogue easier for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community members, clients and researchers.
While the Pathways thesauri has been constructed following a Western model with a system of narrower and broader terms, the technical capabilities of linked data may allow us to show more appropriate relationships than the hierarchical structures dictated by classical classification systems.

6. What is Linked data?
“The term Linked Data refers to a set of best practices for publishing and connecting structured data on the Web” /
Let’s look now at linked data. Here is a definition.
W3C says , “Linked data refers to a set of best practices for publishing and connecting structured data on the web”.
We are very used to the Web enabling us to link related documents.
Information on the web can now be in the form of data. This data can generate connections for the user.

7. Web standards Semantic web Resource Description Framework (RDF)
Expression of relationships (in triplets)
Sally Morgan wrote My place
By using web standards we can link related data.
The semantic web provides a standard way of expressing relationships.
The Resource Description Framework is a concept for data interchange on the web.
The data in these relationships are expressed as triplets
It is this model which allows the expression of relationships such as Sally Morgan Wrote a book called “My place”.

8. How does the web show these relationships?
I can Google a noted anthropologist Professor Bill Stanner.
The results page shows on the right hand side of the screen, a knowledge graph which is an example of linked data. Google describes a Knowledge Graph as “a term for how relationships are built between different people, places and things and reports facts about these entities.”
The graph provides an information box as a combination of words and images.
From Wikipedia it brings in the biographical information of William Stanner and gives details on some of the books that he has written.
When you click on one of these books you go to places like Amazon or Google books.
The Google knowledge graph is an example of linked data.

9. How is linked data of benefit to libraries and archives?
What if a search on Google brought up an item held in a library or archive?
How is linked data of benefit to libraries and archives?
Libraries and archives need to have a presence where the users are and many users start their literature searches in Google.
What if a search on Google brought up an item held in a library or archive? An information box could then display bibliographical details about the item and where it is held.

10. Why can’t we do that now? MARC records can’t be understood by the web
MARC doesn’t support complex linking relationships between entities
So why can’t we do that now?
Catalogue records are in a format called MARC, a standard which was invented over 40 years ago.
But MARC records can’t be understood by the web And MARC doesn’t support complex linking relationships between entities

11. New model for describing bibliographic data
BIBFRAME Uses Linked Data model
Adopted FRBR model (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic records)
Work
Expression
Manifestation
Item
The Library of Congress is developing a new model for describing bibliographic data called BIBFRAME.
It is compatible with Linked Data.
BIBFRAME uses the concepts of FRBR, the functional requirements for bibliographic records
a Work – an intellectual or artistic creation
an Expression – the realisation of a work
a Manifestation – the physical expression of a work
and an Item – which is a typical example of a manifestation

12. Comparison
How does this look in a record? Here is a comparison of a book described using the MARC standard on the left and in BIBFRAME on the right.
What are the similarities in each record - Work and instance are circled in each record.
Information professionals are quite used to seeing bibliographic information in the midst of MARC tags and subfield codes.
What then are the differences?
The data in a MARC record is comprised of strings of text; the data in a BIBFRAME resource points to entities or ‘things; ‘things not strings’ is a catchcry of linked data.
This is moving from keywords that are used to describe things or entities to the entity itself. Different keywords can be used to refer to the same entity, whereas an entity is given a unique identifier. It will take time to adjust to seeing the bibliographic information amongst a different metadata schema with hypertext links throughout.

13. BIBFRAME can include user generated content
BIBFRAME can include annotations along with reviews, holdings and local metadata.
Annotations don’t necessarily have to be textual. Here is an example of a user added photograph as an annotation to a BIBFRAME resource.
An interface for addition of user generated content would need to be well designed to encourage participation and quality contribution.
One of the ATSILIRN Protocol’s, “Description and Classification” addresses the use of terms for indexing, subject headings and classification.
This Protocol encourages libraries and archives to “provide opportunities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to describe and annotate material that relates to themselves and their communities.”
The annotation part of BIBFRAME has the potential to enable libraries and archives to implement this.

14. Retaining and enhancing contextual relationships
Title:
We know that a variety of formats are held in collections and any descriptive tool needs to be able to be applied to all formats. Similarly, a photograph can be described using BIBFRAME.
This example shows a BIBFRAME resource for photographs of rock art, the creator is in this case a photographer. Two instances of this photograph are described, colour slide and digital images.
Like us, other Libraries and archives often have material arranged in collections. When an item is seen alone, it can lose the context of how and why it was created. An item may be described by a separate cataloguing record or be an individual entry in a finding aid. An overarching collection record gives these individual items context. Linked data will give libraries and archives an ability to retain and enhance contextual relationships between items and collections.
Instances
Conceptual example showing relationships of a photograph from a collection held by AIATSIS

15. Establishing appropriate personal name authority headings
The potential to discover and share authoritative information with the wider community
Establishing appropriate personal name authority headings
Personal name authorities loaded to Libraries Australia
VIAF (the Virtual International Authority File)
VIAF uses linked data technologies
Linked data gives us the potential to discover and share authoritative information to wider communities.
AIATSIS has developed a tutorial aimed at indexers and cataloguers working with materials in Australian Indigenous content. This tutorial gives an introduction to best practice for establishing headings for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander personal names. The tutorial includes self-paced modules and practice sessions for hands on experience The Talkin Names tutorial is a practical demonstration of the ATSILIRN protocols in action.
In 2015 AIATSIS provided IFLA, the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions with the conventions we use for constructing the form of names for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander names as authorized access points.
Recently, AIATSIS delivered a file with over 88,000 personal names from one of our authority files to the National Library of Australia.
Many of these name headings are for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people mentioned in both historical and contemporary Australian Indigenous works.
Through the National Library, these records will feed through to VIAF (the Virtual International Authority File), hosted by OCLC, an American based cooperative for the library community to which Libraries across the world contribute.
The National Library of Australia will include the authority records from AIATSIS in its next contribution.

16. When will BIBFRAME be available?
BIBFRAME is a work in progress
There are tools to transform MARC records into BIBFRAME
When will BIBFRAME be available?
The BIBFRAME model and its components are still in discussion and development.
When it is more mature, system vendors will need time to adjust to accommodate it. And then we can expect a mixed environment for some time.
In the meantime, we can spend time learning about it, testing and see how we can make use of linked data in the future.

17. Linked data may be able to show relationships to information in a better way than is currently possible with a hierarchical thesaurus structure
Indigenous
Knowledge Systems
AIATSIS Pathways
Thesauri
Eurocentric Classification Schemes
AIATSIS is planning to review and update the publishing platform for the Pathways thesauri. An outcome of the review may be the ability to have the thesauri published as linked data. The technical capabilities of linked data may allow us to show more appropriate relationships than the structures dictated by western classification systems, to make the data more sortable, clickable and usable by computers and people in different ways to what we can now.
This will give AIATSIS an opportunity to experiment with linked data projects, one of which could be to collaborate with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in discussing terms in the thesauri.
Linked data offers one way of respecting Indigenous knowledge in recognising different non-Western ways of maintaining and protecting knowledge. Technological advances may provide other ways into the future including the development of a new framework which is inclusive of Indigenous knowledge.
Regardless of the technology, code or platform, the fundamental issues are likely to persist and will require close collaboration with the owners of the knowledge systems that we seek to preserve and, as far as is acceptable to the owners, describe and share.

18. Thankyou! Image by Elco Van Staveren