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After my second week of classes and listening to Professor Pattuelli lecture on Linked Open Data, I have somewhat of a better sense of how the RDF triples used with LOD work, and how to use them to express relationships. Our discussion of LIDO and CIDOC-CRM in Art Documentation has made me start thinking of how to map CIDOC ontology onto this triple structure in working with the Whitney’s data. Joshua used Schema.org vocabulary to build relationships in his dataset; I wonder whether the CIDOC-CRM ontology might offer a richer set of relationships terms, and whether it might make the Whitney’s data more interoperable with that of other cultural institutions. At the same time, the broad scope of the Schema.org ontology might make the Whitney’s data more accessible outside of the museum world.
The “student of”,”teacher of”, and “fellow student of” properties in ULAN seem like one potential avenue to explore relationships between artists in the Whitney’s founding collection. Robert Henri, for instance, was a teacher of many Ashcan School artists and an influential figure in the movement. A visualization of the Whitney’s collection data could potentially be created focused around central figures like Henri.
I also wonder whether it might be possible to collect data from a source like Grove Art Online to build relationships. I was just introduced to Grove Art Online in the Art Librarianship class at Pratt, and noticed that it is one of the reference sources used by the Art and Architecture Thesaurus. Grove Art has relationship data on what movements artists are associated with, their patrons and collectors, the materials they used, and people they collaborated with. Grove Art is subscription-based and not openly accessible, however, so I don’t know if it’s acceptable as a source of data.
As well as thinking about ontologies and relationship data, I also looked at how the British Museum has chosen to present its linked data online. In addition to its standard online collection site, the British Museum has its data published in a computer-readable format, organized using CIDOC CRM. Users can access collection data in a variety of RDM resolvable formats, in addition to being able to access an interface for searching the collection using SPARQL queries (http://collection.britishmuseum.org/). The British Museum’s Semantic Web Collection Online may be a good model for publishing the datasets Joshua created this past year, as well as any future data collected during the course of this project.
