1. Linked Open Data: Opportunities & Barriers for Archives Adrian Stevenson LOCAH Project Manager UKOLN, University of Bath, UK Archives 360, Society of American Archivists Chicago, USA 26 th August 2011

2. 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

3. Linked Data Design Issues URIs LD Design Issues Triples http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html

4. Triples Triples statements – ‘Things’ have ‘properties’ with ‘values’ – Subject – Predicate - Object Triples are the basis of RDF and Linked Data Archival Resource Repository Provides Access To The Rolling Stones Keith Richards Is Member Of

5. LOCAH Project Linked Open Copac and Archives Hub Funded by #JiscEXPO 2/10 ‘Expose’ call – 1 year project. Started August 2010 Partners & Consultants: – UKOLN, Mimas, Eduserv, Talis, OCLC, Ed Summers http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/locah/

6. What is LOCAH Doing? Part 1: Exposing Archives Hub & Copac data as Linked Data Part 2: Creating a prototype visualisation Part 3: Reporting on opportunities and barriers

7. Archival Resource Finding Aid EAD Document Biographical History Agent FamilyPerson Place Concept GenreFunction Organisation maintainedBy/ maintains origination associatedWith accessProvidedBy/ providesAccessTo topic/ page hasPart/ partOf encodedAs/ encodes Repository (Agent) Book Place topic/ page Language Level administeredBy/ administers hasBiogHist/ isBiogHistFor foaf:focus Is-a associatedWith level Is-a language Concept Scheme inScheme Object representedBy Postcode Unit Extent Creation BirthDeath extent participates in Temporal Entity at time product of in Archives Hub Model

8. We’re Linking Data! If something is identified, it can be linked to We take items from our datasets and link them to items from other datasets BBC VIAF DBPedia Archives Hub Copac GeoNames

9. Enhancing our data Already have some links: – Time - reference.data.gov.uk URIs – Location - UK Postcodes URIs and Ordnance Survey URIs – Names - Virtual International Authority File VIAF matches and links widely-used authority files - http://viaf.org/ – Names - DBPedia Also looking at: – Subjects - Library Congress Subject Headings and DBPedia – Open Calais for entity extraction – from ‘bioghist’ field

10. http://data.archiveshub.ac.uk/

11. http://data.archiveshub.ac.uk/id/person/nra/webbmarthabeatrice1858-1943socialreformer

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

13. Key Benefit of Linked Data API based mashups work against a fixed set of data sources Hand crafted by humans Don’t integrate well Linked Data promises an unbound global data space Easy dataset integration Generic ‘mesh-up’ tools

14. Linked Open Data Data can be open or closed Linked Data can be open or closed Most benefit gained when data is open

15. Some challenges

16. Data Modelling Steep learning curve – RDF terminology “confusing” – Lack of archival examples Complexity – Archival description is hierarchical and multi-level ‘Dirty’ Data

17. Linking Subjects

18. Linking Places

19. Sustainability Can you rely on data sources long-term? Ed Summers at the Library of Congress created http://lcsh.info Linked Data interface for LOC subject headings People started using it

20. Library of Congress Subject Headings

21. Scalability / Provenance Example by Bradley Allen, Elsevier at LOD LAM Summit, SF, USA, June 2011 Same issue with attribution Solutions: Named graphs? Quads? Best Practice

22. Licensing Ownership of data often not clear Hard to track attribution CC0 for Archives Hub and Copac data

23. Is Linked Data the Way? Enables ‘straightforward’ integration of wide variety of data sources Archival data can ‘work harder’ New channels into your data Researchers are more likely to discover sources ‘Hidden' archives collections of become of the Web

24. Attribution and CC License Sections of this presentation adapted from materials created by other members of the LOCAH Project This presentation available under creative commons Non Commercial-Share Alike: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/