In 2011 the first LODLAM unconference started in San Francisco, bringing together a motley crew of librarians, archivists and museums curators and the odd triples adventurer. I can’t for the life of me find the original email that got me to attend but it really appealed to me at a time.
We’ve now had nearly a decade of LODLAMs which have spawned other smaller gatherings in New Zealand, New York, Toronto (York U.), Montreal (McGill), London and others. This February, the 7th instalment of the LODLAM unconference is being hosted by the Getty in LA. While looking back at previous years and planning the schedule with the committee, two questions came to mind:
- Is Linked Open Data really being adopted by GLAM institutions?
- Looking through the 2011 pictures… Where did all my hair go?!
Adoption is a mixed bag: Some projects like the LAC/Canadiana’s out of the Trenches project are no longer accessible and no one can tell me where the BBC’s LOD offerings are going. The German National Library has consistently been keeping it’s holdings updated in RDF, Sweden has been running an entire library system and the Library of Congress’s LOD ID service is still up, if at times a bit incomplete. The Canada Science and Technology Museum’s RDF offerings don’t have URIs that resolve properly, the Auckland Museum is still going strong with Linked Open Data offerings and it’s a great concern that not even Twitter shaming has been able to keep the British National Library from keeping it’s SPARQL server updated. I could keep going on with a list of projects that keep claiming that they are going to publish triples or with people that are still stuck on religious arguments about serialization.
In some ways, LODLAM is where SIGGRAPH was in the late 80’s: a group of specialists working on complex problems (like rendering a teacup) while the rest of the world calls it irrelevant until CG becomes mainstream in movies and television shows. It’s going to take more time and the recognition will come from applications not the technology or data.
I think back of a conversation I had with Scott Nelson in 2011 about marking up data about American Civil War battles and the (still) limited options in visualizing them. 10 years after, things have not changed all that much. Creating linked open data is a difficult thing even for people who know their data really well. Because the consumption tools are immature and as most GLAM organizations think of success as interacting with a human being, Linked Open Data is a hard sell internally.
To try and nudge things along, we are publishing the conference data as an RDF data set for LODLAM 2020 and you are welcome to add your data to it using this form if you have not done so already. The lodlam.net WordPress site is also creating LOD data through wp-linked-data plugin by Angelo Veltens.
Look forward to seeing you at the Getty next month!