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Incorporating External URIs Into the Whitney’s Linked Data
After my success with querying VIAF last week, I’d like to explore incorporating person/institution URIs from other institutions into the Whitney’s constituent URIs as well.
The Florentine Renaissance Drawings project plans to incorporate linked data and images from the British Museum into its URIs. Linking the Whitney’s data to external sources could have similar enrichment value.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum seems like it would be the most obvious source for enrichment. The SAAM has internal URIs for all of the artists in its collection, many of which include bios and images.
The Smithsonian Archives of American Art also seem like it could provide some enrichment value. The SAAA’s website looks to have been redesigned and relaunched within the last month or so, and the site has persistent URIs for many archival items related to the Whitney Foundation Collection.
Connecting the URIs of archival documents to constituent URIs may be somewhat of a challenge, however. CIDOC’s event structure could be applied to archival documents in a similar way to how it is applied to art objects (http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1117/paper5.pdf). CIDOC’s P129 is about (is subject of) could be used to connect various types of E73 Information Object(s) (ie archival documents) to constituents (as per the Carnegie Provenance Model). This may be better left to a later stage in the project when object and constituent URIs have already been created, but it would be an interesting challenge. Connecting art collection items to archival documents, which was one of the primary goals of me and Victoria’s Art Documentation project this past fall, is something that continues to interest me, and it would interesting to explore how linked data could facilitate these connections.
Querying the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Data
The SAAM doesn’t have an API, but it does have a SPARQL endpoint.
Unfortunately, the SAAM’s person/institution URIs do not include a literal value for the person’s name, meaning I can’t use SPARQL to search for the names of Whitney constituents. These URIs also don’t include any links to outside name authorities like ULAN, VIAF, or Wikidata. This seems like a pretty bad linked data model, as it makes it difficult to connect constituents in the SAAM collection to non-Smithsonian resources.
Given these limitations, I’m going to try manually scraping the SAAM’s Browse Collections to see if I can extract any useful URIs.
Meeting With Alison
I’m now set up with access to the Opendata Server via phpMyAdmin. Not set up with access in MySQL Workbench yet, but can upload/download via online CMS.
