The Dutch Digital Heritage Network (NDE) started in 2015 by the national cultural heritage institutions as a joint effort to improve the visibility, usability and sustainability of the cultural heritage collections maintained by libraries, archives, museums and other institutions. About 1500 cultural heritage institutions are part of the NDE network. From the usability perspective the challenge is to realize a distributed network of heritage information that no longer needs aggregating and postprocessing of the data. This talk will focus on our approach for developing a new, cross-domain, decentralized discovery infrastructure for the Dutch heritage collections. A core element in our strategy is to encourage institutions to align their information with formal Linked Data resources for people, place, periodes, concepts and to publish their data as Linked Open Data. The NDE program works on making all relevant terminology sources available as Linked Data and provide facilities for term alignment and maintaining thesauri. PoolParty (Semantic Web Company), OpenSKOS (Open Source) and CultuurLink (Spinque) are important tools for doing this work.
Another important goal is to provide means for browse the collections in a cross-domain, user centric fashion. Based on possible relevant URIs identified in the user queries we want to be able to browse the available linked data in the cultural heritage network. The bi-directional use of linked data without aggregating data is still a technological challenge.
We decided to build a registry that records the back links for all the URIs used in our network. Next to formal Linked Data definitions of organizations and datasets we will also register object profiles that describe the relations between the object in the collection and the term URIs used in the object description. This information will provide the back links which make it possible to navigate from a term URI to the objects that have a relation with this term. We are currently developing a Proof-of-Concept and will be able to show the first results in preliminary results at the Semantics conference.
Ing. MBI
Koninklijke Bibliotheek, National Library of the Netherlands
https://www.kb.nl/en
Enno Meijers works as an advisor at the Research Department at National Library of the Netherlands. His main area of expertise is information infrastructures and (semantic) web technologies. He currently works as a program manager for the Dutch Digital Heritage Network (NDE).
