Getty’s Contribution to Linked Open Data

I wrote a slightly different version of this post for Catherine Walsh’s #ART327 Collection Management class, but I wanted to share it here as well.

You may have seen the news that the Getty has announced the release of its Art & Architecture Thesaurus as Linked Open Data. What does this mean, and what does this mean in terms of this class? And what is Linked Open Data?

Very briefly, the Art & Architecture Thesaurus is one of the vocabularies produced by the Getty. Art historians and archivists use it to catalog objects, and members of a class in the Art Department here at Montevallo are using a parallel version of it to catalog items of art on our campus. By inputting data into Omeka, students create a searchable database of new knowledge.

My huge caveat here is that I am not an expert in Omeka, or Linked Open Data, or metadata, or the Semantic Web. I’m just trying to piece together the general principles behind organizing knowledge and using open-source content management systems to classify it. It seems that the general principle behind Linked Open Data is that large amounts of information, regardless of what they are, need to be in a consistent format in order for a computer or a machine to search it. The explanation of Linked Open Data by Getty is helpful.

The Art & Architecture Thesaurus is one of several controlled vocabularies, or metadata schemes, that’s used in the art world to describe resources and information. Other fields and other disciplines have their own specific metadata systems. For instance, librarians use MARC records to organize books and other resources, historians and general archivists often use Dublin Core to organize objects in an archive, geographers and geospatial curators use ISO 19115 to catalog data and geospatial resources, art historians use Getty’s Categories for Describing Works of Art, and on and on and on. Each sphere of knowledge has developed its own conventions for organizing objects and ideas within that sphere and making them accessible to other people.

The idea of Linked Open Data is to take all of the disparate spheres of knowledge and standardize the format of their expression so that anyone can search for them. So far, there are some substantial projects out there that make data accessible (see the list here). The other important component is that Linked Open Data takes proprietary systems of information control and moves them into the commons, where anyone can use them and benefit from them. This is true of the Getty projects as well as other projects, like the New York Times and WatchDog.net.

Here’s where Omeka comes in. At its basic level, Omeka is a simple content management system that allows us to create a database of objects that can be searched by other people. Right now, Omeka developers have done some work to move toward creating ways to export data that is created by adding items into Omeka (especially the OaiPmhHarvester plugin). This is developed from the Open Archives Initiative, which is another standardization movement.

Currently, Omeka does not have a Linked Open Data plugin, but its developers “see linked open data as central to the larger goal of integration.” I am not to the point in my own knowledge yet to understand how this all takes place or how it can be facilitated with Omeka. But I get the general idea, I think, and I’m excited about it.