Linked open data and ISNI as a crucial bridge identifier for cultural heritage

This poster presents the LOD-ISNI project aimed at strengthening the long-term cooperation with international partners, and at promoting the use of Linked Open Data and ISNI as a crucial bridge identifier for cultural heritage materials. It is financed by the Belgian Science Policy Office BELSPO and results from the cooperation between:

• KBR, the Royal Library of Belgium
• Library of Congress
• Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec
• British Library
• ISNI International Agency
• OCLC
• Koninklijke Bibliotheek
• Ghent University – Internet technology and Data science Lab (IDLab) and Ghent Centre for Digital Humanities (GhentCDH)
• University of Antwerp

ISNI stands for International Standard Name Identifier (ISO 27729) and is the ISO certified global standard number for identifying contributors to creative works, including writers, publishers, researchers, artists, etc. This persistent identifier is used by numerous libraries, publishers, databases, and rights management organisations around the world in order to uniquely identify persons and organisations involved in creative activities. The use of ISNI offers many affordances: it guarantees a reliable identification and resolves the problem of name ambiguity in search and discovery, it enables machine readable and language independent data exchange, and – being widely diffused on the open web as a bridge identifier across multiple domains – it has become a critical component in Linked Data and Semantic Web applications.

Linked Open Data (LOD) are structured, machine readable data, that are freely available on the web and connected to other data. LOD build upon RDF, a standard to describe facts in the form of triples: “subject – predicate – object”. Tim Berners-Lee proposed 4 principles to publish Linked Data:

1. Use URIs as names for things.
2. Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names.
3. When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information, using the standards (RDF, SPARQL).
4. Include links to other URIs, so that people can discover more things.

LOD are a gold standard for both enriching and maximising the (re)use of cultural heritage data, and thus indispensable for any GLAM-institution or research centre that wishes to improve access to its collections as data, enhance its user experience or contribute to open science.

Despite these affordances and the many policies and platforms to support the move to Open Data, the public availability of cultural heritage data is still limited and the implementation of linked data technologies remains rare in Belgium.

By bringing together key actors that are already actively implementing LOD, as well as those that are just starting this transition, the LOD-ISNI network will organise several activities with the purpose of sharing knowledge on best practices, including regular meetings, workshops and trainings, as well as an international conference. By discussing state-of-the-art solutions and practical problems, the LOD-ISNI network will empower the cultural heritage sector and research institutions in their transition from siloed databases to linked data. In sum, LOD-ISNI allows KBR to develop a long-term and growing learning network with world class partners, and – on its turn – share expertise with others.