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I posed a quick question on Twitter this morning (or this afternoon, for those of you east of the Rocky Mountains) that I feel needs a bit more clarification than I could squeeze into 140 characters, so I thought I’d log into the ol’ blog (for the first time since July) and do some old fashioned clarifyin’.

Anyway, the question I posed was this:

What things do museums do *exclusively* because of tradition? If you were building a museum from scratch, what would you do differently?

December 1, 2010 12:35 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@5easypieces

Koven J. Smith

While it’s easy to think of all kinds of things that museums could do better (and indeed, since asking this question, I’ve received a bunch of excellent replies to this effect), what I’m really trying to get at here are identifying processes that we (perhaps grudgingly) accept as givens, but that we would never enact if we were just starting from scratch today.

A good example of this would be object (or accession) numbers. If museums didn’t already exist, each with their own unique object numbering schemas, I have a hard time imagining that we would take a similar approach to object identification. It seems far more likely that we’d do something along the lines of what Richard McCoy and I have been discussing for a while, something like an ISBN or PURL for works of art. This number would be forever permanent, and would move with the object when deaccessioned, purchased, loaned, or whatever. The reason that this is such an interesting example to me is that because unique objects don’t, in fact, have truly unique identifiers, using them in a linked data context is extraordinarily difficult. The main reason objects don’t have truly unique identifiers is because tradition dictates that objects have identifiers only within the context of an institution–once the object leaves that institution, the identifier no longer has meaning.

It’s just a small example (and a super-technical one, because that’s my thing), but the implications are huge in that we wouldn’t have to build big, complicated systems around compensating for the lack of unique IDs. I wonder what other processes there are like this in our world–how would we build museums differently, if we were just starting out now?

Koven Museum disruptive technology, linked data, Museum, Semantic Web

I just recently had the good fortune to be asked to be interviewed by the Semantic Web consultant and thinker Paul Miller for the “Nodalities” podcast. The interview was fairly wide-ranging, touching on some of the specific projects we’re working on at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, cultural heritage ontologies like the CIDOC-CRM, and our work with Thompson Reuters’ language processing tool, OpenCalais. Paul was a gracious interviewer, and seemed relatively tolerant of my somewhat rambling answers. You can find Paul’s accompanying blog post about the interview here. I’ve included the audio of the interview below, but you can also find it at the Nodalities blog, where you will also find a helpful list of links to resources mentioned in the interview.

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Koven Museum Calais, Cultural heritage, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Nodalities, OpenCalais, Paul Miller, Semantic Web, Thomson Reuters

For those who don’t want to download the slides from our recent presentation at MCN, I’ve included them here as a slideshow. They’re missing the accompanying notes, but Dave Dwiggins (thanks, Dave!) has posted pretty accurate notes from the accompanying talk here. Dave’s notes also include the Q&A that ended the session as well. Enjoy:

Koven Museum mcn2008, semantic museum, Semantic Web, semuse

Image via WikipediaI just wanted to write a quick post saying thanks to everyone who came and saw our presentation “The Semantic Web in Practice” last week at the Museum Computer Network conference. It seemed I couldn’t turn around all week without someone commenting positively on our presentation; your compliments were warmly received by both Don and me. Thanks.

The upshot of all this is that we have now officially formed a special interest group around the idea of creating truly “semantic” museums. More on this as it develops, but for the time being, you can join the discussion in the Semantic Museum Google group.

In addition, the slides from Thursday’s presentation can be downloaded here. I’m not sure how useful the slides are without the accompanying narration, but hopefully the notes added to each slide will help clarify things somewhat. And, just so you don’t have to go to the slides for the list of resources mentioned in the presentation, here they are:

• Dean Allemang & Jim Hendler, “Semantic Web for the Working Ontologist“
• w3c’s RDF Primer
• About SPARQL
• Halo extension for Semantic MediaWiki
• D2RQ (tool for rendering SQL dbs as RDF)

There are a few more resources listed in the slides, but I thought these would be the most helpful.

Koven Museum Don Undeen, MCN, Resource Description Framework, Semantic MediaWiki, Semantic Web, SPARQL, Working Ontologist