Hypertext to Linked Open Data
Michelle Kennedy and Gretchen Alexander
INFO 653-02
Hypertext to Linked Open Data Timeline
from the theoretical to the practical, how have hypertext and linked open data innovated over time?
BIBFRAME project initiated by the Library of Congress to free library data from siloed MARC21 online catalogs and individual records for works.
References
The American Art Collaborative, a consortium of 14 US Museums, is founded to convert a “critical mass” of US collections data to LOD. They develop a subset ontology from CIDOC CRM, the Linked Art Data Model, that will grow into its own community into 2021.
Tim Berners-Lee, the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), describes Linked Data as the basis for the Semantic Web. He lays out the four rules of Linked Data:
Ted Nelson Xanadu 1970
2006
2012
2014
In connection with International Council of Museums (ICOM), the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) is released as a formal ontology for cultural heritage LOD in late 2006.
Vannevar Bush publishes “As We May Think”, a polemic on the possibilities of a memory indexing computer called the “memex”, and the first iteration of hypertext theory
1945
1965
Ted Nelson officially coins the term ‘hypertext’ at a conference where he proposes his project Xanadu, a democratized information library for the globe
1996
Judy Malloy and Cathy Marshall publish ‘Forward Anywhere’, a hypertext narrative and collaborative memory project developed through the Xerox PARC artist residency program
Gretchen Alexander & Michelle Kennedy
INFO 653 Knowledge Organization
Spring 2021, Prof. Bree Midavaine
Pratt Institute School of Information
Angela Haas proposes a counter history to hypertext, basing her research in indigenous studies
2007
Hypertext theory has changed overtime, since it was first coined in the 1960’s by Ted Nelson. In the 2000’s discourse surrounding the decolonization of hypertext is bringing new ideas to the forefront about authority and knowledge organization. Linked Open Data (LOD) is based on the hyperlink (specifically, HTTP URIs) and the goals of Open Access; many of the initiatives for LOD in the cultural heritage sector include the development of living, open source ontologies. As LOD is relatively new, there is no one ontology that is standard across, or even within, disciplines. The lack of standardization has made it difficult to link data between sets, especially across libraries, archives, and museums with art, archaeological, or scientific collections. This (non-comprehensive) timeline is a snapshot of the theorists and the practical initiatives that will continue to change the Open Access landscape in cultural heritage and beyond.
Metadata on 20 million texts, images, videos and sounds was transformed into linked data and made available from the Europeana, an EU initiative, dataset.
What is hypertext?
“An organizing principle”
“The dynamic linking of concepts”
“Texts which contain links to other texts”
“Text which is not constrained to be linear”
(https://rreisman.medium.com/the-pandemic-reminds-us-everything-is-deeply-intertwingled-we-need-better-logics-for-that-eb40a1776d13)
(https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10438328-the-garden-of-forking-paths)
Dr. Vannevar Bush
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush)
(https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/)
Ted Nelson and Xanadu
(https://hisaac.net/2010/08/24/project-xanadu.html) and (thetednelson.com)
Forward Anywhere- Judy Malloy and Cathy Marshall
(https://www.are.na/blog/women-in-hypertext)
Wampum As Hypertext- Angela M. Haas
(https://www.theboxplymouth.com/whats-on/wampum)
LOD and cultural heritage
Why do we care about Linked Open Data?
What have people done with museum collection LOD?
What are the possibilities?
Museum Collections Metadata
GRAIN SILOS
DATA SILOS
Courtesy Kirk Olson (CC BY 2.0)
The American Art Collaborative (AAC)
The American Art Collaborative (AAC) was founded in 2014 as a consortium of 14 U.S. institutions
Project
Funded by Mellon Foundation (2014-2017) and IMLS grants
Federated Approach v. Aggregated Approach
AAC Results
Result for search term “cat” in Demo, linking data from two institutions
The Linked Art Data Model
CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) is too complicated, too nuanced, and has classes that don’t apply to the AAC datasets.
Courtesy Wellcome Library, London CC BY 4.0 (cropped)
A new ontology: Linked Art Data Model
This leads to a new LOD initiative/community
So about Linked Art...
Scope Limitations
“Data Provenance
Recording the individual events in which the data itself is created, modified and managed is out of scope of this work. The global Linked Open Data community has various approaches to this problem, with varying degrees of complexity and accuracy. Given the relative infancy of the work in the Art domain, we feel that adding this is an unnecessary burden at this stage at any level below the entire dataset.
Quantification of Uncertainty
Similarly, the degree of certainty about the data being expressed is valuable and of interest to researchers, but requires a significantly more complex environment. This would also prove an unsustainable burden, and is impractical to use even if it were provided.”