[open-heritage] Getting started with new Working Group on Open Data in Cultural Heritage

Wed Jun 23 12:48:11 UTC 2010

Hallo All,

My name is Ian Ibbotson and I'm an open source developer/consultant at
Knowledge Integration Ltd. I've worked with descriptive metadata and
search standards in the cultural heritage domains for 18 odd years,
and in that time I've worked with many of the national libraries and
archives as well as smaller projects and institutions.

Currently most of my attention is taken up with the UK Culture Grid
(http://culturegrid.org.uk) platform which hosts services such as the
Peoples Network. GC aggregates and preserves over a million metadata
descriptions from 45 UK based cultural institutions (Growing to 150
providers and 3m records over the next 2 years) institutions ans is
one of the biggest UK gateway feeds for www.europeana.eu. I'm also
involved with a MOL middleware project to provide and ongoing feed
from the museums MIMSY server through SOLR and SPARQL, and we're
hopeful this might grow into a more generic MIMSY -> Semweb/SOLR
toolbox.

My current side projects include a tool quantize OAI record streams
into .zip files more suitable for sharing on CKAN. (Actually, this
tool is a plug-in designed to sit inside the JISC funded FixRep
project doing metadata triage, which may also be applicable to
cultural data for tasks like named entity extraction of people and
places).

Overall, I'm deffo on the tech rather than policy side of things and
I've had to live through the pain of things like indexing massive EAD
records and schema crosswalks, so I've usually something to say on
those issues :)

I like beer too :)

Best,
Ian.

On 22 June 2010 18:07, Jonathan Gray <jonathan.gray at okfn.org> wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> This is a new list for discussion of open data (and open content?) in
> the cultural heritage sector. At the moment I've started this list
> with only a handful of people and so it would be great if everyone
> could give a sentence (!) or two briefly introducing themselves and
> giving a sense of the main things they are interested in.
>
> I'm Jonathan Gray at the Open Knowledge Foundation -- and I'm
> particularly interested in representing data about people, artefacts
> and collections in new ways (particularly on maps/timelines), and in
> the potential of read/write cultural heritage databases which local
> communities, experts and others can add to.
>
> --
> Jonathan Gray
>
> Community Coordinator
> The Open Knowledge Foundation
> http://blog.okfn.org
>
> http://twitter.com/jwyg
> http://identi.ca/jwyg
>
> _______________________________________________
> open-heritage mailing list
> open-heritage at lists.okfn.org
> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-heritage
>

-- 
Ian Ibbotson
Director
Knowledge Integration Ltd
35 Paradise Street, Sheffield. S3 8PZ
T: 0114 273 8271
M: 07968 794 630
W: http://www.k-int.com