Bridging Communities of Practice: Emerging Technologies for Content-Centered Linking

Thursday, April 03, 2014 - 1:30pm - 3:00pm
Watertable Ballroom (ABC), Renaissance Baltimore Harborplace Hotel

MW2014: Museums and the Web 2014

Baltimore, MD, USA

Presented by Douglas W. Oard

 

This paper describes the potential of new technologies for linking content among cultural heritage collections and between those collections and collections created for other purposes. In recent years, museum professionals, archivists, librarians, and digital humanists have worked to render cultural heritage metadata in an interoperable form as linked open data. Concurrently, computer and information scientists have been developing automated techniques that have significant implications for this effort. Some of these automated techniques focus on linking related materials in more nuanced ways than have heretofore been practical. Other techniques seek to automatically represent some aspects of the content of those materials in a form that is directly compatible with linked open data. Bringing these complementary communities together offers new opportunities for leveraging the large, diverse, and distributed collections of computationally accessible content to which many of us now contribute.