Hello Linked Conservation Data Consortium members,
As we reach the two month mark for our nascent Conservation Linked Data Consortium we wanted to let you know what we’ve been up to as we work on a range of activities to get the project underway.
We thought we’d send out this email and continue in the months to come. Let us know if there’s a different way you’d like to stay in touch. We are open to many options, including regular network teleconference.
Initial announcement of grant award
We sent out a round of announcements of grant award to various lists and social media in February. If you noticed any key lists or groups we didn’t reach, we’d love to know.
Calendar of events
We’ve developed the calendar of major events to happen over the course of the year/grant award - more information on the first two below:
- Network introduction webinar: 3 May 2019
- Workshop on terminology (Stanford University): 6, 7 June 2019
- Workshop on modelling conservation data (University of the Arts London): 12, 13 September 2019
- 2nd Network webinar: 8 November 2019
Project website
Thanasis put up the Linked Conservation Data website hosted under Ligatus. https://www.ligatus.org.uk/lcd/
This website is the main web presence for network information and activities. Please note - we put up logos for Network member institutions. If you’d like to replace yours with another that is more specific to your site or department, just let us know.
Articles in IIC, ICON, and AIC Newsletters
We’ve submitted brief articles on the project to various newsletters that should be appearing in the next couple of months. Please look for them and share them with colleagues. Who else should we be reaching out to and how? Let us know.
First webinar
Planning is well underway for the first webinar. It’ll be from 3:30-5:30pm BST/7:30-9:30am PT. Choosing a good time for the range of time zones involved was challenging - we hope this works for most members. Two hours is long for a webinar, but we will send out a link of the archived webinar for future viewing if people can’t stay for the whole thing.
The program so far includes comments by Thanasis and Kristen introducing the Consortium and the basic premises of Linked Data. Then we’ll have three presentations by different groups aligned with cultural heritage/conservation who are either developing linked data projects or are studying the potential in their areas:
- Gallery Systems staff
- Getty Conservation Institute staff discussing Arches and DISCO
- Dominic Oldman of the ResearchSpace, British Museum
For more details see here: https://www.ligatus.org.uk/lcd/meeting/webinar-1
The webinar will be hosted on the zoom platform and registration is already open:
https://stanford.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_rHxRD9vgQF6GxePmhjHvMw
Those of you who are able to travel to London, please let us know as a group of us will be attending the webinar from the Wellcome Trust at Euston.
First in person workshop
We’ve also begun planning for the workshop at Stanford on terminology. Right now we’re planning on starting on Thursday afternoon with an initial session introducing thesauri, SKOS and other key foundational topics. We’ll break for dinner and then resume for sessions on Friday morning and Friday afternoon. In these sessions, we plan to look closely at existing thesauri used in conservation to examine gaps, discuss alignments, and plan future work on terminology.
Registration is now open for the first workshop: https://goo.gl/forms/wilbpdgYmf74jPbu1
Thesaurus questionnaire
In starting our initial planning for this we thought we’d investigate what are people using as the basis for terminology in their documentation now. Thanks to those of you who responded with choices for us. This led us to develop a brief questionnaire -please have a look and fill it in if you haven’t already: https://goo.gl/forms/BUKdcCctiRBF3WxC2
We are listing vocabularies used by colleagues over here: https://www.ligatus.org.uk/lcd/controlled-vocabularies
Gabriele Grigorjeva hired
Gabriele will be working with us as a project administrator. She’s an experienced admin for similar research projects and we’re delighted she was able to take the Linked Conservation Network on. You will be hearing from her as she’ll assist with travel arrangements for the two in-person workshops. She can be reached at: g.grigorjevaite@arts.ac.uk