Joined up thinking: linking and sharing Science Museum collections and content

The Science Museum has much content online featuring its collections, objects  and contextual stories, but this is fragmented across many websites and fails to add up to a credible and coherent online destination. It is known from our analytics that rich engagement with our online content takes place across the internet; on blogs, on twitter etc, but this engagement isn't reflected on our own web presence.

Our user-centred design process told us that users had relatively little interest in the data itself - their goal was content - but that the richness of the linkages our data could drive greatly increased the content's value. We set up a project to create aggregated content on our core website, interlinking it from various domains - archives and images, collections catalogues and content management systems - through its key ideas; allowing it to form a nexus for the wider conversations taking place around it.

As a result we have built a new infrastructure with linked open data at its heart. We have adopted a pragmatic ontological approach to maintain the integrity of our data sources, while leaving open the possibility of translating this for a greater variety of ontologies in the future. The result is an online product with an underlying data structure that combines two networks of linkages: a data-driven, structured, ontological one; and an organic one driven by user behaviour, creating a flexible platform with long term value - the simplest possible solution to a complex problem.