integrating information from museums, libraries

Integrating Information fromMuseums, Libraries & Archives

RLG Cultural Materials Initiative

July 2001

“…stuff really is important. Scholars use it to separate fact from fiction and

to interpret the human record.”

John W. HaegerRLG Vice President Emeritus

RLG News Issue 49, Fall 1999

3RLG Cultural Materials

The problem space…

Providing access to collections is central to the mission of most “memory institutions”

• Access to physical collections constrained by physical factors (space, location, resources, preservation etc.)

Increasing demand for access to digital collections for:

• Research & learning

• Teaching

• Personal use

• Commercial use


Digital collection characteristics

Heterogeneous structured textual descriptions

Digital representations or “surrogates” of materials, e.g.:

• Images

• Audio files

• Video clips

• Animations

• 3-D models

• “Complex Digital Objects” Supporting/contextual materials & external

links

“We need a new vision of opening up historically inaccessible special

collections and linking them to both the existing and developing base of

scholarly publication.”

Clifford LynchSelecting Library and Archive Collections for Digital Reformatting

RLG symposium

August 1996


Challenges to be met

Complex issues in delivering integrated access to digital collections:

• Diverse descriptive practices

• Meaningful integration across collections

• Digital representation of physical materials (“surrogates”)

• Multiple audiences and applications

• Institutional rights and responsibilities


Different (descriptive) strokes...

Different curatorial approaches

• Museums

• Libraries

• Archives

• Visual Resources

• Historical Societies Different subject disciplines

• Arts & humanities

• Natural sciences

• Social sciences etc...



Different levels of granularity

• Collection level

• Group level

• Item level Different levels of detail

• Simple inventory

• Collections management documentation

• Authority reference files

• Associated contextual & research materials



Different data structures

• Flatfile

• Hierarchical

• Tagged text

• Relational

• Object-oriented Different data value standards

• AAT, ULAN, TGN

• LCSH, NAF, DDC, UDC

• MeSH, SHIC etc...


Some descriptive standards

AMICO Data Dictionary

CDWA CIDOC RM & CRM CIMI DTD & Profile Dublin Core EAD

MARC MESL Object ID SPECTRUM VRA Core Categories Other, superceded

descriptive standards…

+1,001 home cooked flavours...


Relationships are important


CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model Based on ICOM/CIDOC “International

Guidelines for Museum Object Information: The CIDOC Information Categories”

Object-oriented “domain ontology”

• Formalises the semantics needed to describe objects and relationships in the cultural heritage context

Mappings to existing standards ISO standardization process begun


Benefits of CRM

Elegant and simple compared to comparable Entity-Relation model

Coherently integrates information at varying degrees of detail

Readily extensible through O-O class ‘typing’ and ‘specializations’

Richer semantic content; allows inferences to be made from ‘fuzzy’ data

Designed for mediation of heterogeneous cultural heritage information...


“The primary role of the CRM is to serve as a basis for mediation of cultural

heritage information and thereby provide the semantic 'glue' needed to transform today's disparate, localised

information sources into a coherent and valuable global resource.”

Nick Crofts & Martin Dörrhttp://www.ville-ge.ch/musinfo/cidoc/oomodel/


CRM learning curve

Model necessarily complex in order to model the broad domain of cultural heritage information

O-O modeling paradigm may be unfamiliar compared to entity-relation modeling

• Just similar enough to be confusing! Notation problems

• Difficult to express mappings textually

• UML: Universal Modeling Language


RLG active participants in:

June 2000 CRM stakeholders meeting in Aghios Pavlos, Crete

ISO TC46 SC4 CRM Working Group

• CRM submitted to ISO as a “Community Draft” standard

CIDOC CRM Special Interest Group EU-funded CHIOS (“Cultural Heritage

Interchange Ontology Standardization”) Project

• RLG is a non-funded partner


CRM Prospects

CRM needs further refinement, particularly to enhance support for research access and bibliographic material

Needs more introductory “outreach” material

RLG enthusiastic about:

• Raising awareness of the model

• Soliciting feedback from the community

• Testing and validating with real data and real users to help finalize the model

Next meetings: Barcelona, July 2001


RLG Cultural Materials

An Alliance of RLG members that will:

• Develop the Cultural Materials Service, a collective digital information resource

• Identify and promote standards of best practice for digital surrogates and descriptive information

• Establish appropriate rights management framework

• Develop powerful, user-friendly web-based discovery and retrieval tools

• Develop a sustainable business model that will support long-term development of the service


Vision for RLG Cultural Materials

Provide integrated access to aggregated heterogeneous cultural content

• Rich toolset for discovery, examination, comparison, and use

Provide reliable, distributed, user-friendly access to multiple user groups

Enhance the usefulness of individual collections through rich cross-collection links

Transform research and learning in the digital environment


RLG Cultural Materials - Data Model Must support wildly heterogeneous

data! Support “who, what, when, where”

access Resulted in “event-based” entity-

relation data model, influenced by:

• CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model

• InDecs Metadata Framework

• ABC/Harmony Logical Model


Cultural Materials Logical Data Model

Version: 2001-05-04‘T’ signifies a link to the Type entity (not displayed for clarity)

“Show me photographs of New York from the 1940’s…”

PlaceName = “New York”EventType =

“creation”EventBeginDate = “1940”EventEndDate = “1949”

WorkType = “Photograph”

surrogateURL = “http://…”


CMI Descriptive Data Loading

Convert contributor descriptive data to XML form

• Draft description guidelines to be published shortly

Create mappings using XSLT Stylesheet to convert data to XML form compliant with CMI XML DTD

• XSLT transformations re-usable for standards-compliant data!

Load program loads data into the IBM DB2 database…


CMI Descriptive Data Loading

SGMLEAD

MARC

DCto CMI

XSL

MARCto CMI

XSL

EADto CMI

XSLSGML

TOXML

EADXML

EAD XML DTD

MARCTO

XML

MARCXML

MARC XML DTD

OtherXML

Other XML DTD

CMIDB2

LOADXML

CMI XML DTD

DCXML

DC XML DTD

Otherto CMI

XSL

XSLT


The Future

Tangible benefits of adherence to descriptive standards

Powerful, object-oriented data models, e.g.

• CIDOC CRM

• IFLA FRBR Availability of mapping tools and

resources Shared vocabulary resources & authority

files

• Encoded Archival Context Initiative

integrating information from museums, libraries

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