2012 in Review: Linked data & metadata (Week 4)

Linked data in action - the Civil War Data 150 Project

Friday 19 October 2012, 2.30pm-3.30pm
Where: Arts 1.33 / CHE Seminar Room

According to Mashable, the world’s information is doubling every two years. How does this challenge us as researchers? As well as creating new knowledge, do we have a responsibility to help make sense of this river of information by curating and creating connections?

Toby Burrows, manager of eResearch Support at UWA, spoke to us about meta data (data about data) and linked data – which provide ways for us to connect information, data and knowledge in a rapidly expanding digital universe.

It was a great chance to learn more about UWA's eResearch Support and Digital Developments Unit. Based in the Reid Library, Toby's team offer training and advice on research data management, advice on open access publishing, digitising collections and manage the UWA's Research Repository - among other things!

Toby suggested some links for those of us who wanted to learn more:

• Probably the first service (2004) was MuseumFinland: http://www.museosuomi.fi/  (mainly in Finnish – but with a tutorial in English)
• This later evolved into: CultureSampo: http://www.kulttuurisampo.fi/?lang=en
• There’s a whole lot of information from the research group which put these services together at: http://www.seco.tkk.fi/applications/
• Europeana is now doing a lot of development in this area – but it’s still in a pilot phase (and different from the main Europeana site, which is a fairly conventional large-scale database of digital objects). 
• An interesting starting-point is: http://pro.europeana.eu/web/guest/thoughtlab/new-ways-of-searching-and-browsing
• This builds on an earlier project called MultimediaN: http://e-culture.multimedian.nl/
• The Pelagios project is working on something similar for the classical world: http://pelagios-project.blogspot.com.au/p/about-pelagios.html
• The British Museum is also doing something similar, called ResearchSpace: http://www.researchspace.org/home
• A couple of US services with some similar features and technologies:
• ViewShare (Library of Congress): http://viewshare.org/
• Freebase (now owned by Google): http://www.freebase.com/
• Alan Liu’s RoSE system is at: http://rose.english.ucsb.edu/ 
  (you need to register and get a login)