Sharing knowledge

Niccolo Caldararo <caldararo [at] aol__com> writes

>About 30 years ago Robert Organ proposed an venue for conservators
>to share their work.  He called it the National Institute for
>Conservation.  This institute would preserve all the treatments of
>conservators the world over as a resource to present and future
>conservators.  It would be both an archive and a living facility
>where people could do research and have questions answered about
>what people had done in what situations so that archived reports
>could be mined for decision making evidence.
>...
>I think this site could function much like Robert Organ had hoped
>his NIC would.  People could upload their treatment reports,
>experiments on materials, etc., images of problems and we could all
>download these articles, images and data and discuss problems
>together.

The answer is already here and what Robert Organ (who I am sorry I
have never met) proposed can happen very soon.  The answer is the
semantic web and a technology called RDF and without boring the list
with technical acronyms, it can be summarised to this: "Linked Open
Data".  "Linked" is clear: we are all online and our resources (aka
webpages) link to each other.  "Open" is clear as well: free of
charge, sharable, re-usable, re-sharable etc.  "Data" is a problem.
There is no standard for conservation documentation, no data
standard.

Even if we are all invited to submit our documents to Research Gate,
that would be of little value, as a conservator trying to use the
resource to learn from it would have neither the time and nor the
capacity to consume pages and pages of free-text often in a foreign
language.

So to create the right data we must move away from free-text and we
must promote standardisation efforts (Getty AAT, CIDOC CRM etc).
Then translation is much easier and consuming large amounts of data
becomes more manageable as it is done by a computer.

Relevant note: ICON in the UK has recently (Iconnect May 2013) put
an announcement out for ICON members who would be interested in
joining a possible new group in conservation documentation.

Dr. Athanasios Velios
Ligatus
University of the Arts London
+44 2075146432


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                  Conservation DistList Instance 27:5
                 Distributed: Wednesday, July 10, 2013
                        Message Id: cdl-27-5-003
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