Cultural Heritage Scholarly Constructs

Dominic Oldman

Principal Investigator ResearchSpace

www.researchspace.org

British Museum

What is a scholarly construct?

• An agreed pattern for describing a particular concept. For example,– How is object production defined?

– What is a visual depiction?

– What are the different acquisition / provenance scenarios?

– How are object parts represented?

• Independent of any particular data implementations. YCBA <> BM

• Promotes data harmonisation and analysis across different organisations.

Yale Centre British Art(CDWA)

British Museum(SPECTRUM)

Schema Standards & Customisation

Content: Jenn Riley

Design: Devin Becker

Work funded by the Indiana University Libraries White Professional Development Award

Copyright 2009-2010 Jenn Riley

Vocabularies

Ontological Knowledge Representation

• Ontologies describe concepts and relationships, but you need to get the right balance.

– Too high level - squeeze the goodness out of museum data into artificial boxes (e.g. Dublin Core)

– Specialisation prevent agreement on constructs.

Parmenides – the nature of reality

Too Specialist!!

General Aggregators too General

The Institution The Aggregator

o The further the data is from the originator the less assumptions can be made about it.

o Default to a common set of fields.

o Challenge for retaining knowledge is not to prescribe a common set of fields but to find a common set of generalisations within a domain to harmonise different datasets.

o Using aggregator models as a primary publication models prevents the formation of meaningful scholarly constructs.

The curator / researcher

• Real world ontology that matches the richness of museum records.

• The only purpose built ontology that can adequatelyrepresent a British Museum record.

• The only ontology that allows relevant and practical cross organisational constructs.

• The only ontology that allows practical collaborative enrichment beyond the BM record. Open Constructs!

• rosetta stone.pdf

E.g. Normalised Acquisition ConstructsConstruct 1 - Acquired From

• Bequeathed by• Donated by

• Exchanged with• From

• Purchased from• Transferred from: • Unclaimed item:

Construct 2 - Received Custody From• On loan from

Construct 3 - Acquired Through (intermediary)• Purchased through• Bequeathed through• Donated through• Exchanged through

Construct 4 - Acquisition Motivated By• In Honour of• In Memory of

Construct 5 - Found By• Collected by• Excavated by

Acquired From Patterntrue in any organisation

Typing by Vocabulary

Reification Construct

Production Authority

• Visualise different data sources against the CRM.

• Use scholarly constructs as a knowledge base for ontology mapping.

• Plug-in local vocabularies.

• Manage the relationship and changes between data producers and multiple aggregators.

Thanks

Dominic Oldman

Principal Investigator ResearchSpace

www.researchspace.org

Doldman@thebritishmuseum.ac.uk

British Museum