Linked Open Usable Data: with a focus on Linked Art, IIIF, and OpenRefine APIs

1. IIIF and Linked Open Data
David Newbury, Enterprise Software Architect
LODLAM, Feb 4th, 2020

2. There are only two hard things in
Computer Science: cache
invalidation and naming things.
— Phil Karlton

3. IIIF for
our Collections

4. IIIF for
our Experiences

5. IIIF for
our Homepage

6. What does it mean to
do Linked Open Data?

8. The Six Levels of Linked Data
1. Authority
2. Reconciliation
3. Bidirectional Linking
4. Aggregation
5. Interoperability
6. Reuse

9. Level 1: Authority
Providing a consistent way to identify
both entities and the institution
providing information.

10. We do this with URLs.

11. URLS are cheap.

12. URLs are a promise.

13. Dereferenceability is a goal,
not a requirement.

14. You may not need
a PURL service.

15. Level 2: Reconciliation
Using authorities and thesauri to
disambiguate between similar real
world entities.

16. Linked data is only special
if it links with other data.

17. It is really hard for a computer
to make judgment calls.

18. It's OK to have local authorities.

19. If you don't know about
OpenRefine, you should.

20. Level #3: Bi-directional Linking
Making and publishing connections
between systems and institutions

21. How do you share the work you
did in reconciliation with others?

22. How do you evaluate the quality
of the data?

23. What context do you need to
provide?

24. Level #4: Aggregation
Enhancing discovery by providing
search and access to information
across collections

25. Access for humans, not robots.

26. This only needs to be a
summary of the information.

27. This is where dereferencability
starts to matter.

28. Level 5: Interoperability
Developing interfaces that present
information from many sources
in a single way

29. Shared interfaces require shared
mental models.

30. This is when ontologies start to
matter.

31. This is for robots, not people.

32. Level #6: Reuse
Allowing one institution to import
information from another while
maintaining the provenance
of the data

33. How do we build upon each
other's work respectfully and
productively?

34. How do argumentation, citation,
and collaboration happen in
data?

35. The six levels:
• Authority: Identify entities and provide institutional authority
• Reconciliation: Disambiguate using authorities and thesauri
• Bidirectional linking: Public connections between
institutions
• Aggregation: Search and access across collections
• Interoperability: Interfaces that pull from many data sources
• Reuse: Import while maintaining provenance

36. So...
How do you actually
do any of this?

37. First: With people.
• Adam Brin
• Alyx Rosetti
• Ben O'Steen
• Charles Webb
• Daniel Sissman
• Eric Gardner
• Eric Lavine
• Gregg Garcia
• Hande Sever
• Josh Gomez
• Kristen Carter
• Matthew Hrudka
• Nadiia Kysil-
Heckman
• Nathan Lomeli
• Nick Hulea
• Niqui O'Neill
• Rit Lee
• Selina Zawacki
• Stefano Cossu
• Ted Dancescu
• Viktor
Grabarchuk

38. Second: with Standards and Standard Tools
• REST
• JSON-LD
• SPARQL
• IIIF
• Web Annotations
• Activity Streams
• Postgres
• ElasticSearch
• Amazon Neptune
• Vue.js
• Python

39. Our decisions:

40. Invent as little as possible.
We're a tiny tech startup:
what makes us special is NOT our software.

41. Build REST-first.
The internet is HTTP(S).
We need to leverage that as much as we can.

42. Build agnostic APIs.
We cannot afford to build an API per-application,
but it's OK to have a chatty system.

43. Eat our own dogfood.
The only way we'll support these APIs
is if our bosses call us when they break.

44. Know where you're going.
We're not going to build everything today.
We need to make it possible to build it tomorrow.

45. No art history emergencies.
Performance isn't going to be our bottleneck.
Staff turnover is.

49. Zooming in...

58. Zooming back out...

78. Reconciliation

79. Open Refine for the
Getty Vocabularies
http://services.getty.edu/vocab/reconcile

80. Typeahead

81. Documentation

82. Contextual
Lenses

83. A lot, yeah?

84. The six levels:
• Authority: Identify entities and provide institutional authority
• Reconciliation: Disambiguate using authorities and thesauri
• Bidirectional linking: Public connections between
institutions
• Aggregation: Search and access across collections
• Interoperability: Interfaces that pull from many data sources
• Reuse: Import while maintaining provenance

85. Not every project needs all
levels.

86. There's value at every level.

87. The needed work is only
incidentally technical—
most of it is practice.

88. Thank you.