Lightning talks by Mia Ridge, Peter Neish (Victorian parliamentary Library), Conal Tuohy (HuNI), Helen Morgan (eResearch, University of Melbourne) and Adam Bell (Australian War Memorial) got the ball rolling. A spontaneous Melbourne-San Francisco-Skype-in with Jon Voss and Simon Sherrin started the general discussion.

A detailed write-up from notes taken by myself and Ely Wallis is now up at Culture Victoria.

Big thanks go to Mia Ridge, Ely Wallis and Ingrid Mason for their insights and planning for what will continue to be an active space…  With, we anticipate, more muffins…

Melbourne LODLAM muffin remnants

My paper, Radically Open Cultural Heritage Data on the Web is kind of a wrap-up of the year’s work promoting LODLAM, examining our goals (which included making Linked Open Data a topic of conversation at global conferences–win!) and methodologies, as well as the road ahead.

Sharing cultural heritage the linked open data way – everyone’s invited
Johan Oomen, Marieke van Erp, Lotte Belice Baltussen, The Netherlands

Using an RDF Data Pipeline to Implement Cross Collection Search
David Henry, USA

Linking European Television Heritage
Nikolaos Simou, Vassilis Tzouvaras, Nasos Drosopoulos, Jean-Pierre EVAIN, Johan Oomen, Marco Rendina, Italy

I’ve written about our session and a few of the other sessions over the UK Discovery blog for those who wanting the full lowdown.

The day will start with a series of lightning talks (5-10 mins) from people active in the field (including Mia Ridge @mia_out) and move to a structured discussion around practical applications in the Victorian and National context (including collaboration around WWI/ANZAC material). More details to come closer to the date.

Lightning talks are being arranged. For those that have projects being worked on, please get in touch with Eleanor Whitworth @elewhitworth – the more the merrier!

Hyro graffiti

Session details are: 9.30am – 1.00pm (lunch provided)
Date: Tuesday 17th April
Place: Melbourne Museum, Carlton Gardens

RSVP: 10th April: Eleanor Whitworth, Senior Arts Officer/Content Curator, Culture Victoria (Monday – Wednesday)
Email: eleanor[dot]whitworth[at]dpc[dot]vic[dot]gov[dot]au or @elewhitworth

rain + night + driving | swirling thoughts | CC by-nc 2.0

The Canberra Linked Open Data – Libraries, Archives Museums (LODLAM) minibar will be held on Tuesday 27th March, 2012 from 5.30-6.30pm. We will meet in the Fellows Bar and Cafe, University House at the Australian National University.

Those local to Canberra and in the library, archives, museum and gallery world of metadata and web development, or gov2 enthusiasts or those attending the Australasian Digital Humanities 2012 conference may wish to find peers and interested in attending the lodlam minibar. The Fellows Bar at University House is about 5 minutes walk from the Shine Dome (where the conference is being held).

The event is a means to:

• Get to know each other – let’s all get a drink from the bar and we do some introductions
• Get some shared understanding – let’s collate some information about what people are doing, ask questions and do some quick brain storming

lodlam attendees may like to head out to dinner to continue the conversation about linked open data (and perhaps digital humanities use of LOD too) in smaller groups.

Postscript:

We had about 18 people gather together to talk linked open data – libraries, archives, museums. From University of Queensland, Anna Gerber and Kerry Kilner; from the Australian War Memorial Roby Van Dyk, Adam Bell, Liz Holcolmbe; from University of Melbourne eScholarship Research Centre, Gavan McCarthy; from University of Western Sydney, Peter Sefton; from Deakin University, Deb Verhoeven; from Victoria University of Wellington, Sydney Shep; from Auckland War Memorial Museum, Russell Briggs; and last but definitely not least, Mia Ridge, PhD candidate from the Open University (UK).. and Oyvind Eide, PhD candidate at King’s College, London (UK). There were a handful of others, but I think the pong from the scratch and sniff ice cream stickers was affecting my capacity to memorise who was there… who I’ve missed, feel free to advise or correct me.

The upshot was, we shared our interest, questions, potential projects, desire to regroup again, so, here’s the takeaway:

• A number of people in the group (from Australia) are working on the HuNI project (Humanities Networked Infrastructure) NeCTAR funded virtual laboratory project (which aims to start in May and goes for 2 years). Linked data is going to be a key aspect of this project. It is being led out of Deakin University.
• There is another NeCTAR funded research tools project, Aust-ESE which will involve linked data, led out of University of Queensland.
• Anna Gerber talked about how ITEE eResearch Group at University of Queensland has been focusing efforts around the use of RDF and linked data with their open annotation work.
• Gavan McCarthy talked about how Melbourne eScholarship has been using linked data in their projects.
• Peter Sefton talked about how he’s been interested and working with linked data in his application development work.
• The Trans-Tasman ‘museums folks’ talked about an ongoing, and stronger collaboration around WWI data to enable them to contribute to centenary commemorations of WWI in 2014.
• A Melbourne #lodlam date was set, 17th April, more information will be coming, check with @elyw or @elewhitworth for more information or watch for blog posts soon.
• A Brisbane #lodlam date was mooted, 26th August, to time with a possible THATCamp, the 2012 International Council of Archives Congress check with @wragge and @annagerber for more information or watch for more blog posts soon.
• A clear idea that a Sydney #lodlam event, late October/early November, to align with the eResearch Australasia 2012, and needs to have 3 sessions: a tech session, a content session, a mixed session, so that all parties (developer, scholar, collection manager, etc) can all get their heads around the work space. Check with @1n9r1d @dfflanders @richardlehane for more information or watch for more blog posts soon.

That’s all folks! See you at the next #lodlam Australian Style!

Bondi Swimming Club by Tom Holbrook | CC BY NC SA 2.0

In November last year DigitalNZ hosted a LOD-LAM summit in Wellington, New Zealand. There was a small contingent of Aussies over in Wellington for the National Digital Forum that stayed on for a day to attend the summit. It was a day of great exchange and collective understanding, and better, some rattling of chains into action. The word is that WWI and ANZACs are going to drive some Trans-Tasman collaboration around linked open data – and – there are a number of eResearch projects based around Australia that will have linked open data at their core and allied to cultural datasets that are curated by researchers in the scholarly community in Australia. So perhaps in a year’s time there might be both cultural collection and scholarly datasets up and linked… let’s see.

Some of us are keen to run a series of LODLAM events in Australia to build the conversation and wider understanding and also look at opportunities to “do something” together. So here’s what’s happening so far:

You tell us – here’s a short straw poll – even better leave your name and email so we can be in touch.

The more we know of your interest, the better that would be! Murmurs are there may be a lodlam event that slides into the National Digital Forum 2012 in New Zealand in November too.

Of course, they’re not just making cute videos over there at Europeana.  They’ve published metadata for 2.4 million objects under a CC0 license, with millions more on the way.

From Corey:

Please note that the smaller afternoon session has already filled up there is now a wait list, but we still have slots open for the morning plenary session.

http://www.metro.org/en/art/488/

Best,
-Corey

***
LOD-LAM-NYC: A Day of Linked Data Discussion & Activities for the NY Metropolitan Area

Thurs, Feb 23, 9:00am-6:00pm

There is no fee to attend, but registration is required.

Following the success of the LOD-LAM Summit (http://lod-lam.net/summit/) in June, 2011, discussions of Cultural Heritage Linked Data have continued at a variety of Regional LOD-LAM (Linked Open Data for Libraries, Archives, and Museums) events. These events, characterized by their “Unconference” style and focus on cutting edge Semantic Web technologies, have continued to further the goals defined in the World Wide Web Consortiums Library Linked Data Incubator Report and the various outputs of the Stanford Linked Data
Workshop.

Continuing this conversation, we would like to announce LOD-LAM-NYC, two related events that add up to a day of Linked Data discussions for the Cultural Heritage Sector in the NY Metropolitan Area on February 23, 2012. The event will be comprised of two separate sessions, a morning plenary, and a smaller afternoon “hands-on” workshop. While these events are being offered free-of-charge, separate registration is required for each (see below for links).

This event, co-organized by METRO, The New York Public Library’s NYPL Labs, and New York University, sponsored by METRO, and hosted by NYPL, will accommodate 175 attendees for the morning sessions. The afternoon workshop will be smaller, with space for up to 40 participants.

Learn more & register at http://www.metro.org/en/art/488/.

LODLAM Meetup, NYPL Labs, July 2011

It comes as no surprise that I begin this post with such Romantic allusions. Our discussions of vocabularies –  as technical behemoths and cultural artefacts – were lively and florid at a recent gathering of researchers library and museum professionals at LODLAM-NZ. Metaphors  of time and tide – depicted beautifully in this companion post by Ingrid Mason, highlight issues of their expressive power of their meaning over time and across cultures. I present a very broad technical perspective on the matter beginning with a metaphor for what I believe represents the current state of digital cultural heritage : a world of silos.

Among these silos lie vocabularies that describe their collections and induce meaning to their objects. Originally employed to assist cataloguers and disambiguate terms, vocabularies have grown to encompass rich semantic information, often pertaining to the needs of that institution, their collection or their creator communities. Vocabularies themselves are cultural artefacts representing a snapshot of sense making. Like the objects that they describe, vocabularies can depict a range of substance from Cold War paranoia to escapist and consumerist Disneyfication. Inherent within them are the world views, biases, and focal points of their creators. An object’s source vocabulary should always be recorded as a significant part of it’s provenance. Welcome to the recursive hell of meta-meta-data.

Within the context of the museum, vocabularies form the backbone from which collection descriptions are tagged, catalogued or categorised. But there are many vocabularies, and the World Museum needs a universal language. LODLAM-NZ embraced the enthusiasm of a universal language but also understood the immense technical challenges that follow vocabulary alignment and, in many cases, natural language processing in general. However, if done successfully, alignment does a few great things: it normalises the labels that we assign to objects so that a unity of inferencing, reasoning and understanding can occur across vast swathes of collections; it can provide semantic context to those labels for even deeper, more compelling relations among the objects and it can be used to disambiguate otherwise flat or non-semantic meta-data, such as small free-text fields and social tags.

Vocabulary alignment is the process of putting two vocabularies side-by-side, finding the best matches, and joining the dots.

In many cases, alignment is straight forward – a simple string match on the the aligned terms could be sufficient to create a match. However, as the above example shows, aligning can require a lot more intuition – ceremonial exchange from the Australian Museum’s thesaurus could map to the ceremonies, exchange and gift concepts from the Getty’s Art and Architecture Thesaurus. This necessary one-to-many relation, along with other possible quirks and anomalies such as missing terms, semantic differences between term use and interpretation, and the general English language bias of many natural language processing tools make such a task fraught with difficulty, especially when alignment occurs across vocabularies that address specific cultural groups.

The challenges of alignment are compounded when the source terms come from non-semantic sources, such as unstructured free text (labels, descriptions and comments) and user tags. Let’s say for example that someone has tagged an object with the term gold. Now, could they mean “this object is made of gold” or “this object has a golden colour”? The Getty’s Art and Architecture thesaurus has the term gold in both senses of the word. We could use a tool called SenseRelate::Allwords that gives us the correct WordNet concept (based on the context of an object’s description label) but then we need to align the WordNet gold to the AAT’s gold. Performing these two computations in a pipeline significantly increases the risk that the tag as ‘misinterpreted’ – or even worse, it’s original meaning and intention is skewed or lost altogether. Vocabulary alignment, if not done correctly, has the potential to dilute, skew, or destroy the meaning of its terms.

Over the past few years, elaborate algorithms have been developed to try and address these alignment challenges. However they often don’t work on the unpredictable and highly heterogenous nature of cultural data-sets, or their performance differs across and even within vocabularies. And when things do go wrong, problems are often hard to diagnose and even more difficult to solve.

But researchers have brought humans back into the equation. The idea is that, within the alignment process, machines do the heavy lifting and processing on very simple and straight-forward natural language processing tasks while humans fine tune the steps of the process until they are satisfied with their results. This paper, by Ossenbruggen et al., describes what they call interactive alignment. Their Amalgame tool allows humans to make judgements about the nature of the vocabularies being aligned, fine-tune parameters and analyse, select or discard matching results. This mixed initiative approach empowers both computers and humans to solve tough problems. Likewise, the  vocabularies (or ontologies within the computer science science realm), while encoded in bits and bytes, are only realised in the minds of their creators, their users and conversely, the people that interact with the objects.

The concept of meaning, understanding and encoding – and the crucial differences between the three concepts, seeded a reflective discussion at LODLAM-NZ. Even in light of the technical issues, how can we ensure accurate alignment that preserves the sense making of the objects from both their custodians and creator communities? What vocabularies do we use, what vocabularies should we align to and why? What are the dangers of doing this? We could not find the answers to these questions – to steal an anecdote from Michael Lascarides, the best we could do is create better questions, and more importantly, a broader understanding of alignment on both technical and social dimensions.