Cultural institutions on the semantic web
Opportunities of aliada software
MúzeumCafé 50.
The piece begins with a summary of Kevin Kelly’s views, presented at a TEDX lecture in 2007. His observations can still be regarded as valid. In Kelly’s view the development of the network has gone through the following phases: in the beginning computers got connected; it was the period of Telnet and Gopher when, with the help of the Telnet program, from the terminal of a large computer you could log into another distant large computer and operations could be executed there. And simplifying, Gopher made access to information in the distant computer easy. The whole technology was based on computers forwarding and sharing packages. Every computer participated independently, whether the package was or wasn’t meant for it. In the next phase pages got connected. The computer as a unit was replaced by the page as a unit. That is the period of the World Wide Web, which is known to everyone since we are still in this period in 2015. In this world everyone has to share on the net what they have in the form of websites and services in order that others could also join and place a link on their page. That is how you can really become part of the World Wide Web. According to Kelly’s 2007 lecture, the next phase will be the period of connecting data. In 2015 it can be said that that phase has more or less already arrived. This period is usually called the era of the Semantic Web, in which the data can be published in the form of RDF statements. In this period data must be published so that they can interact with other data. The more data you share, the more you can get out of the system. It can happen that it is not worth paying for the services, i.e. publishing your own personal data, but in the case of open public collections nothing should hold institutions back from publishing the meta-data describing the items in their collection.