The idea of connecting collections is really fantastic, but often, collections can only be connected through data that doesn't feature in heritage collections. There are great connections to be made between the Bradford Industrial Museum collections and the Saltaire Collections, but in this example, they were only made through 'combing' - a process, a concept and a job - but not an object or collection item in itself.
We need more of our heritage related data to be open, machine readable, and linkable to properly connect our collections.
This image shows the different ways in which collections can be linked.
The yellow boxes are Wikipedia articles, the orange ones are Bradford collections, pink are Saltaire collections, and the purple is data from Grace's Guide
Here we can see that Susan Excell worked in the combing department at Salt's Mill for 47 years and that we can make a link between her and the image of Noble Combing machines in both the Saltaire and Bradford collections.
However, knowing that Susan, as a comber, is likely to have used a Noble Comb machine is logic that we have applied through out knowledge of what someone in a combing department is, does, and worked with. We have made that connection ourselves.
If we wanted a machine to make that connection, we'd need a way for the machine to identify combing, knowing that someone who worked in a combing department was a comber and that they were involved in the process of combing and used combing machines.
That data is often in the inbetween for collections. It is the connective tissue that doesn't feature in a collections management system in a linkable way.
In this example, Wikidata is the key way of linking.
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simon66 — 3 years ago
This is a very effective means of visualising these relationships.