FAIR Data Digest #15
why you should care about a single trustworthy data source for Belgian heritage metadata?
Hi everyone,
greetings from Karlsruhe in Germany where I am attending a conference about research data infrastructure at the moment. More on it probably next week ;-) For this week already a warm up, I will talk about our contribution to this conference, the MetaBelgica project (I talked about earlier at FAIR Data Digest #5).
đ Insights: The research data infrastructure MetaBelgica
If I ask you to get data about a specific book, you might go to the national library. If I ask about a specific painting you go to the museum that has it. This is more or less straightforward, usually the library wouldnât have (possibly contradicting) data about the painting from the museum.
However, for metadata related to persons, organizations, locations and events this is another story. The library will have data about the author of books. And if one of those author happens to be a painter, the museum will have data about that painter too! Those institutions not necessarily talk to each other, meaning that curators of both institutions create the same data twice. Hopefully it is the exact same data, otherwise, who to trust if one information is different in both data sources?
This is were the MetaBelgica project (Q119717964) comes in! Currently there is no single trustworthy data source about persons, organizations, time/events and locations (entities) related to Belgian Cultural Heritage. Sure, some foreign institutions might have data, and some local Belgian institutions too. But if they are not properly linked this is a problem. In a best case scenario they both at least point to a platform such as Wikidata. But then Wikidata becomes the source of truth, which actually is not what it is meant or want to be. There should always be references to claims made on Wikidata.
The Royal Library of Belgium (my employer) is one out of ten Federal Scientific Institutes (FSIs) in Belgium. Five of those are related to Cultural Heritage. And the following four are joining forces in the MetaBelgica project: The Royal Library (Q107329675), the Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage (Q2235462), the Royal Museums of Fine Arts (Q377500), and the Royal Museums of Art and History (Q945059). We talking about millions of Belgian entities that we want to combine.
Hence we want to solve this problem on a national level in the federated state of Belgium. We want to combine the data of the majority of Belgian Federal Scientific Institutes active in the Cultural Heritage domain. This sounds easy, but actually is a lot of work. On the one hand, a lot of (possibly poor quality) data needs to be integrated. On the other hand, those are different institutions with which use different tools and data standards and follow different cataloging rules.
Roughly there are two challenges to solve: integrating the data in the first place using an interoperable data model, and govern and curate the data in a shared entity management system. For the integration we rely on Linked Data techniques and our experiences from the BELTRANS project (Q114789456). Related to the platform, we haven chosen to use Wikibase (Q16354758), the open source software behind Wikidata. That software enables curators of the different institutions to manage the data without technical skills like programming.
Next to providing FAIR data, our goal is the longevity of the platform. Therefore we would like to include the operation of the platform into the daily cataloging tasks of the partnering institutions. This means that during the project we have to study the status-quo and develop both organizational and technical solutions on how we can manage our data together.
Curious? Check out the link below to find the presentation that I will give today at the 1st Conference On Research Data Infrastructure (CoRDI) (Q120753666). Here is also a link to the proceedings including our submitted abstract (DOI: 10.52825/cordi.v1i).
Thatâs it for this week of the FAIR Data Digest. I hope you found the content interesting. Donât forget to share or subscribe. See you next week!
Sven