The Dutch Digital Heritage Network (NDE) started in 2015 by the national cultural heritage institutions as a joint effort to improve the visibility, usability and sustainability of the cultural heritage collections maintained by libraries, archives, museums and other institutions. About 1500 cultural heritage institutions are part of the NDE network. From the usability perspective the challenge is to realize a distributed network of heritage information that no longer needs aggregating and postprocessing of the data. This talk will focus on our approach for developing a new, cross-domain, decentralized discovery infrastructure for the Dutch heritage collections. A core element in our strategy is to encourage institutions to align their information with formal Linked Data resources for people, place, periodes, concepts and to publish their data as Linked Open Data. The NDE program works on making all relevant terminology sources available as Linked Data and provide facilities for term alignment and maintaining thesauri. PoolParty (Semantic Web Company), OpenSKOS (Open Source) and CultuurLink (Spinque) are important tools for doing this work.
Another important goal is to provide means for browse the collections in a cross-domain, user centric fashion. Based on possible relevant URIs identified in the user queries we want to be able to browse the available linked data in the cultural heritage network. The bi-directional use of linked data without aggregating data is still a technological challenge.
We decided to build a registry that records the back links for all the URIs used in our network. Next to formal Linked Data definitions of organizations and datasets we will also register object profiles that describe the relations between the object in the collection and the term URIs used in the object description. This information will provide the back links which make it possible to navigate from a term URI to the objects that have a relation with this term. We are currently developing a Proof-of-Concept and will be able to show the first results in preliminary results at the Semantics conference.
Enno Meijers works as an information manager at the National Library of the Netherlands. His main focus is metadata management and discovery services. The National Library is one of the partners in the Digital Heritage Network (NDE). This is a national program aimed at increasing the social value of the collections maintained by the Libraries, Archives and Museums in the Netherlands by improving their sustainability, usability and visibility. For the past year he has been working on the development of a new cross domain discovery infrastructure for the heritage collections. Linked Data and (distributed) web technologies will be at the core of this new infrastructure. Earlier he has been responsible for the development of the National Library Catalogue platform build as one of the services for the national digital infrastructure for the Public Libraries. He is one of the founders of the Dutch DBpedia chapter and currently a member of the DBpedia Association Board. He studied Electrical Engineering and Business Informatics and has been working for libraries for the past eighteen years.
