Linked Open Data and The Digital Archaeological Workflow at the Swedish National Heritage Board

Linked Open Data

and

The Digital Archaeological Workflow

at the

Swedish National Heritage Board

Marcus Smith

[email protected]

A little background• Marcus Smith,

Operations Officer at theSwedish National Heritage Board on Gotland, Sweden

• Government agency for heritage and the historic environment

• Preservation, use/re-use, development

• Works with linked open data, and digitising the workflow of archaeological practice

SOCHSwedish Open Cultural Heritage


• K-samsök –‘Cultural Cross-Search’http://www.ksamsok.se/



• Metadata aggregator & web service for cultural heritage institutions

• Monuments, buildings, museum collections…





• ≈40 institutions

(≈25–30 million triples)

• 2.1 million artefacts

• 880 thousand photographs

• 830 thousand monuments

• 440 thousand documents

• 110 thousand historic buildings

• 40 thousand personages

• 2000 historical events

• 1500 historic maps





• ≈40 institutions

• ≈5 million database objects

Harvesting, Linking &

Dissemination• Object metadata

harvested from the content provider using OAI-PMH

Cultural Heritage

Institution’s

Database

SOCH

Local SOCH

adapter

OAI-PMH




• The metadata is then enriched with additional semantic links to related objects

Burial

mound

depicted by

described by found at

ArtefactDocument

PhotoVendel

Period

dated to





• Links can be manually added (UGC)

Burial

mound

has topic

Book

Wikipedia

Article

describes





• Links can be manually added (UGC)

• Available as RDF, queryable via an API

SOCH

Application

RDF/XML

JSON-LD

REST +

CQL

HT

TP

Benefits of Linking• Linking facilitates cross-

search


search

• Linking simplifies discovery, and clarifies context

Obje

ct

meta

da

ta

Re

late

de

xte

rna

l

ob

jects

Images

Re

late

dS

OC

H o

bje

cts

The old gallows (Galgberget), Visby – Riksantikvarieämbetet


search


• Linking allows unanticipated connections appear!

The old gallows (Galgberget), Visby – Riksantikvarieämbetet


search


• Linking allows unanticipated connections appear!

’Galgberget: Memories of Wisby’ – Västergötlands Museum

SOCH as a Platform• SOCH as a platform for

development


development

• Kringla: a web interfacehttp://kringla.nu/


development


• Mobile apps

• Mashups


development


• Mobile apps

• Mashups

• Museum portals

• Over 225 million API requests since launch in 2010

Licensing & Reuse• Only metadata is indexed

– all objects link back to a permanent URI at the source institution with their full record



• All metadata is CC0• Metadata includes

licensing information for the main record





• Of 1.8 million ‘rich’objects, 1.2 million are CC or PD





• Of 1.8 million ‘rich’objects, 1.2 million are CC or PD

• SOCH is the Swedish national aggregator for Europeana

The Future of SOCH• More institutions delivering

data

• Triplestore, SPARQL endpoint

• Ultimately, we’d like it if SOCH in its current form wasn’t needed – if each institution made their own data available as SPARQL-queryable RDF on the semantic web.

SOCH

API

The Future of SOCH• More institutions delivering

data

• Triplestore, SPARQL endpoint

• Ultimately, we’d like it if SOCH in its current form wasn’t needed – if each institution made their own data available as SPARQL-queryable RDF on the semantic web.

DAPThe Digital Archaeological Process

The Problem• No central fieldwork

register

’Charles Babb parts storage’ – SDASM (flickr)


register

• No central digital archive for archaeological data


register


• Digital availability of fieldwork reports is patchy


register



• Existing resources not linked

’silos’ – Doc Searls (flickr)


register



• Existing resources not linked

• Inefficient information transfer(digital → paper → digital)

How It Works – The Computer.

The Output Unit. (Ladybird books)

Goals for DAP• Fully digitised seamless

information transfer

’CERN storage servers’ – skimaniac (flickr)



• Digital archive for

archaeological data




archaeological data

• Access to source data




archaeological data


• Semantically linked

data

’Anchor Men of the Mauretania’

Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums (flickr)

’Come in We’re Open’ – jilleatsapples (flickr)



• Digital archive for archaeological data


• Semantically linked data

• Openly licensed, re-useable data

• National ‘events’ register

DAP so far…• Government directive, with extra funding for five years

• LOD as a core idea; openness and transparency as core

values

• Collaborative effort with the archaeological community

• DAP requires a new data infrastructure for us at RAÄ

• DAP requires a new way of working for archaeologists in

Sweden:

– Technical challenges

– Licensing challenges

– Mindset challenges

DAP so far…• Already in place:

– SAMLA reports/PDF

repository:

http://samla.raa.se/



repository:


– Processes mapped



repository:



– Conceptual modeling

ongoing

Acto

r / Ro

le

Org

anis

atio

n

Org

anis

atio

nLegal

framework

Legal

fram

ew

ork

Legal fra

mew

ork

Archaeological

event

Method Analy

sis

Fie

ldw

ork

Documentation

Resolution

Documentation

Development

Research

eventActor

/

Role

Assessment event

Legal

status

Monument

typePeriod

Information

management event

La

nd

ma

na

gem

ent

eve

nt

Legal

event

Natural

event

Tangible

Heritage

Temporal

ContextGeographical

Context

Event

Context

Operative

Context


– SAMLA reports/PDF repository:http://samla.raa.se/


– Conceptual modeling ongoing

• Still to plan:– protocols & formats

– data mapping

– digital archive…

• To do straight away:

– rescue fieldwork data

– start a skeleton of an

events register

– …and ‘master data’

such as ontologies,

thesauri/controlled

vocabularies!

Structured Vocabularies• SOCH publishes LOD…

• …but the majority of the classification metadata is still text strings, rather than URIs pointing to terms in authoritative controlled vocabularies

• We’re going to need a number of such thesauri in for the data a future DAP infrastructure is going to handle

• Monuments types

• Legal status

• Events

• Periods

• Materials

• Built heritage

• Evidence types

• Techniques

• Artefact types

• …etc

• Extant/non-existent

• Internal/external

Who manages what data?• Local authorities: resolutions

• Fieldwork units: field documentation; produce reports

• National Heritage Board: national monuments register, buildings register, monuments types thesaurus, etc; archive reports

• Forest Agency: forest sites

• Museums: finds

• Universities, SND: research data, analyses

• National Land Survey: geospatial data

• Law: legal terms/concepts, legal events

• We need to be able to

manage the data

we're responsible for

• We need to be able to

connect to (fetch)

data that external

bodies are

responsible for, and

react when they

change

Challenges• We welcome suggestions and feedback -

we're very much finding our way as we go!

• DAP is a massive undertaking, and we

don’t want to reinvent the wheel if we can

help it.

DAP

SOCH

http://www.raa.se/dap

http://www.ksamsok.se/

http://www.kringla.nu/

[email protected]

@carwash

Linked Open Data and The Digital Archaeological Workflow at the Swedish National Heritage Board

Technology

Transcript of Linked Open Data and The Digital Archaeological Workflow at the Swedish National Heritage Board