[Fenella France]

Meeting Title:
Heritage Science Research Data – Challenges of LOD Authoritative Sources
 
Collaborative session notes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bEfFo3iffhwZreCzr4h83UDUwLkq1B2DtBKT0PlkgHo/edit
 
Meeting Location: Commonwealth B
Meeting objectives
Presentation and discussion of the current linked heritage science data initiative in Preservation Research at the Library of Congress using LOD analytical and instrumental sources, the challenges of access to true LOD, and avoiding repeating related terminology. For example; we can refer to a Getty term for ‘centimeter’ and a QUDT one linked to the same value, and it will be understood as a centimeter value by systems purely following w3c/qudt standards, and by those who are part of the linked art / heritage science research data cohort.
• Discussion of how to move forward in collaboration with RDA partners and interest groups
• Discussion of advantages, issues, challenges and opportunities
• Current heritage science and STEM vocabularies, terminologies
• Identification of interested and additional partners to expand and engage a broader more diverse audience
 
Meeting agenda
1. Presentation and demonstration of the data visualization with linked research data sources idea behind this BoF (20 minutes) 
Data research analytical and instrumentation types that have been include spectral imaging, x-ray fluorescence (XRF), gas- chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), fiber optic reflectance spectrometry (FORS), Fourier transform infrared spectrometry (FTIR)
2. Overview of the objectives for moving forward and discussion of how to engage with 
current interest groups, (discussions, all participants) 40 minutes 
3. Identification of other potential group members (all participants) (5 minutes) 
4. Summary of the results, actions, and identification of contributions of the group members (TBD)
 
Short description
Heritage science is inherently multi-disciplinary, drawing scientists from a diverse range of fields – chemistry, physics, material science, engineering, and archeology, to name a few. The need for authoritative linked open data is critical to enable efficient collaboration and accurate sharing of research data between aligned fields. Currently a Data Visualization Project Initiative (DVP) has created a cloud-based integration of scientific data analyses linked to geo-located data on a visual rendering of the heritage object. This initiative uses a commonly shared international infrastructure, the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), expanding the framework and open access through the Mirador viewer to include scientific data from a range of STEM disciplines. One of the challenges with including the scientific data is linking to authoritative sources for instrumentation, methods, and scientific definitions, terminology and vocabulary. The STEM community could make scientific data and datasets available to a broader user base thorough structured linked data that reuses existing vocabularies rather than each institution creating a new structure. The United States and Europe have initiatives to move forward with shared open data, especially in regards to broader and easier dissemination for diverse user groups – scientists, researchers, academia and the public. 
The purpose of this proposed BoF meeting is to expand the use of true linked open data (LOD) with authoritative sources that relate to a diverse range of research data. Further, to understand what other RDA STEM group projects related to shared LOD scientific authoritative sources for instrumentation and analytical techniques are underway that we can make use of, contribute to and integrate with heritage science data. We have been following the developments from the IUPAC chemistry group to move IUPAC gold to LOD data. Discussions with data and infomatics and library colleagues at NIST and other institutions have indicated significant crossover between research data within chemistry, archaeology, materials science, physics and other fields. Addressing the current capabilities for true linked open data that exist within STEM disciplines to provide authoritative sources will form the scope of the discussion around heritage science, to determine how this may already be represented or developed within existing RDA interest and working groups. Data analytical and instrumentation types include spectral imaging, x-ray fluorescence (XRF), gas-chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS), fiber optic reflectance spectrometry (FORS), Fourier transform infrared spectrometry (FTIR) to name a few.
 
Additional links to informative material
IIIF is used widely in a range of United States and European initiatives. (iiif.io). IIIIF provides access to image-based resources is fundamental to research, scholarship and the transmission of cultural knowledge and is comprised of a growing community of the world’s leading research libraries and image repositories have embarked on an effort to collaboratively produce an interoperable technology and community framework for image delivery. IIIF has the goals of: giving scholars an unprecedented level of uniform and rich access to image-based resources hosted around the world; defining a set of common application programming interfaces that support interoperability between image repositories; developing shared technologies – image servers and web clients that provide a world-class user experience in viewing, comparing, manipulating and annotating images. The IIIF consortium is global http://iiif.io/community/consortium/#the-iiif-consortium. Current EU initiatives using IIIF include Europeana https://www.europeana.eu/portal/en , CENDARI (Collaborative European Digital Archival Research Infrastructure, http://cendari.eu) and DARIAH (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and the Humanities, http://www.dariah.eu). Stanford University is developing Mirador 3 and we are working with their engineers to ensure any plug-ins are open source, accessible and available to other users. We want to ensure through the DVP that there is seamless access to all available information related to scientific data for a cultural heritage object on IIIF. Reducing the gap between the humanities and scientific aspects of cultural heritage can foster the engagement of cultural heritage and STEM scholarly communities within the digital realm, creating a more accessible and interoperable digital library of images and data. More so, it is the utilization and reuse of existing science research data initiatives. Part of this progress has included adapting or assessing how to adapt CRM and CRMsci In order to translate CRMsci into Linked Art’s dialect of CRM. This allows a view into the science process without restricting the ability to create specific project types.
Other terminology and vocab links for heritage data and science include: 
https://linked.art/ The Linked Art model strongly recommends using Getty vocab terms wherever possible, and those vocabularies are a very good fit for the cultural heritage community. However, for scientific data the terms are not always adequate, or appropriate ones simply do not exist. We are attempting to take an inclusive approach — for instance, for the measurement units used in heritage science, these can be specified with both Getty and QUDT, an approach that we think should cover the needs of most interested parties. In the long term, we would like to discuss the concept that QUDT is far more likely to become the established standard for measurements of all kinds. 
http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabularies/ 
https://goldbook.iupac.org/ 
http://www.obofoundry.org/ (Open Biological and Biomedical Ontology (OBO) Foundry – ontologies for many of the specific instruments and techniques in use in heritage science labs
http://qudt.org/ (Quantity Kinds, Units of Measure, Dimensions, and Types – W3C)
https://www.allotrope.org/ 
https://wikidata.org/
 
 

Discussion