scholarly semantic constructs
TRANSCRIPT
Cultural Heritage Scholarly Constructs
Dominic Oldman
Principal Investigator ResearchSpace
www.researchspace.org
British Museum
What is a scholarly construct?
• An agreed pattern for describing a particular concept. For example,– How is object production defined?
– What is a visual depiction?
– What are the different acquisition / provenance scenarios?
– How are object parts represented?
• Independent of any particular data implementations. YCBA <> BM
• Promotes data harmonisation and analysis across different organisations.
Yale Centre British Art(CDWA)
British Museum(SPECTRUM)
Schema Standards & Customisation
Content: Jenn Riley
Design: Devin Becker
Work funded by the Indiana University Libraries White Professional Development Award
Copyright 2009-2010 Jenn Riley
Vocabularies
Ontological Knowledge Representation
• Ontologies describe concepts and relationships, but you need to get the right balance.
– Too high level - squeeze the goodness out of museum data into artificial boxes (e.g. Dublin Core)
– Specialisation prevent agreement on constructs.
Parmenides – the nature of reality
Too Specialist!!
General Aggregators too General
The Institution The Aggregator
o The further the data is from the originator the less assumptions can be made about it.
o Default to a common set of fields.
o Challenge for retaining knowledge is not to prescribe a common set of fields but to find a common set of generalisations within a domain to harmonise different datasets.
o Using aggregator models as a primary publication models prevents the formation of meaningful scholarly constructs.
The curator / researcher
• Real world ontology that matches the richness of museum records.
• The only purpose built ontology that can adequatelyrepresent a British Museum record.
• The only ontology that allows relevant and practical cross organisational constructs.
• The only ontology that allows practical collaborative enrichment beyond the BM record. Open Constructs!
• rosetta stone.pdf
E.g. Normalised Acquisition ConstructsConstruct 1 - Acquired From
• Bequeathed by• Donated by
• Exchanged with• From
• Purchased from• Transferred from: • Unclaimed item:
Construct 2 - Received Custody From• On loan from
Construct 3 - Acquired Through (intermediary)• Purchased through• Bequeathed through• Donated through• Exchanged through
Construct 4 - Acquisition Motivated By• In Honour of• In Memory of
Construct 5 - Found By• Collected by• Excavated by
Acquired From Patterntrue in any organisation
Typing by Vocabulary
Reification Construct
Production Authority
• Visualise different data sources against the CRM.
• Use scholarly constructs as a knowledge base for ontology mapping.
• Plug-in local vocabularies.
• Manage the relationship and changes between data producers and multiple aggregators.
Thanks
Dominic Oldman
Principal Investigator ResearchSpace
www.researchspace.org
British Museum