Posts Tagged ‘RDTF’

Following in our footsteps

Wednesday, July 6th, 2011

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

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Out and about in Birmingham and London

Monday, March 7th, 2011

RDTF

On Tuesday 1 March, myelf and Chris Keene, Technical Development Manager for the Library and SALDA project partner attended the start up meeting for the projects running as part of  the JISC Resource Discovery Taskforce, Infrastructure for Resource Discovery (RDTF)

RDTF is due to get a new name soon. I hope they keep the Task Force bit, possibly because it makes me think of G-force from Battle of the planets

The day was very useful for finding out about the other projects running alongside SALDA. Andy McGregor, JISC  Project Manager, impressed upon us the wider implications of the projects, what lessons are can be learnt and the importance of these blogs for disemminating our findings to encourage sharing and collaboration. This is new territory we are in and we are not alone. Common issues of licensing, standards and what vocabularies to use for linked data were discussed during the day, along with an issue that I feel strongly about; what is the added value of linked data for the end user? I hope to answer this question in a future post.

UKAD

The next day I went along to the first UK Archive Discovery Network (UKAD) Forum at TNA.  A really great day, well put together with three plenary  sessions and then 5 groups of 3 parrell sessions running for 30 minutes each with a space outside the rooms for demonstrations and networking. This lent a really buzzy atmosphere to the day, not least because we were discussing the online future of archives and archive data. I really appreciated the opportunity at the start of the day to stand up and introduce ourselves and say who we would be interested in talking to. This got rid of alot of slidling up to people during the lunch breaka nd starring at their badges. Using this forward approach it was a good day for SALDA as I met with Pete Johnston from Eduserve and LOCAH who will be working on the project with us transforming our EAD into RDFs and spoke to Adrian Stevenson and Jane Stevenson at the LOCAH project, whose templates SALDA will using to create linked data.

It was nice to see a University of Sussex reading list screen shot making its way into a presentation on Linked Data by Richard Wallis from Talis, hopefully we will have two blobs on the linked data cloud soon! The semantic web relies on collections of reliable open data to work so that links can be made and it is exciting to think the our Mass Observation Archive catalogue data could be one of these datasets.

A super report of the day by Bethan Ruddock at the Archives hub is available on their blog here.

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