Question: If others wanted to take a similar approach to your project, what advice would you give them.
Our advice at the start would be:
1. Get your data ready. We are working on our catalogue data to make it more structured so that we can be ready to export to other formats and make it more portable. Regardeless of whether it becomes Linked Data in the future, we are getting ourselves ready. This is also probably the most time consuming aspect. From personal experience, once you start looking at your catalogue data, you’ll find lots of things that you want to change or are missing or don’t make sense so the work starts to grow…
2. Are you in a position to licence your data? We chose the catalogue data of the Mass Observation Archive as we were confident of its provenance so we could make it fully open and available under ODC-PDDL. This hopefully will allow the greatest flexibility for people wanting to use the data and fits with the ethos of the project and the JISC Discovery strand
3. Find out about other similar projects! We at SALDA realise the value of these blog posts to anyone wanting to do a similar project to SALDA. We followed in the footsteps of the LOCAH project and were able to use their stylesheet and experience in tranforming archival data into Linked Data. We are working with the Pete Johnston from Eduserv whose knowledge and experience is invaluable. You can see his contribution to the blog here
4. Find examples of Linked Data in use, in human readable format so that you can show stakeholders, colleagues, friends what it is that you are on about. I use the BBC wildlife pages and how they link to Animal Diversity Web