Jon Voss, a leading thinker and doer in the digital history space, will be giving a 45 minute on Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives and Museums, followed by a Q&A/discussion. This event is free and open to the public.The event will take place at 12pm in the Wachenheim Trustees Room in Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, NYPL. Feel encouraged to bring lunch to enjoy during the talk. This should be a great introduction to an important topic.
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“Data! Data! Data!” he cried impatiently. “I can’t make bricks without clay.” – Sherlock Holmes, from The Adventure of the Copper Beeches.
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According to a definition on LinkedData.org, “The term Linked Data refers to a set of best practices for publishing and connecting structured data on the web.” This has enormous implications for discoverability and interoperability for libraries, archives, and museums, not to mention a dramatic shift in the World Wide Web as we know it.
Data is increasingly driving the internet economy, and innovations in the Semantic Web and Linked Data offer glimpses into the future of what many are calling Web3.0. But aside from advertisers predicting our behavior and better targeting consumers, what is it good for? What exactly is it and what does it do? And perhaps most importantly, what are the possibilities for harnessing this technology to increase human knowledge and forward the common good?
In this presentation, we’ll explore the fundamental elements of Linked Open Data and discover how rapidly growing access to metadata within the world’s libraries, archives and museums is opening exciting new possibilities for understanding our past, and may help in predicting our future.
~45 min. talk, ~30 min. Q&A. Feel free to bring lunch!
Voss is the Strategic Partnerships Director of Historypin, a location-based community driven public history project. He recently organized the first International Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives and Museums Summit, hosted by the Internet Archive and funded by the Sloan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He’s also the project manager of Civil War Data 150, a collaborative project utilizing Linked Open Data to connect and discover information about the American Civil War during the 150th anniversary.
