A placeholder page to discuss a possible meetup with people interested in the applications of linked data, microformats, RDFa for museums and the cultural heritage sector.

Date: July 7

Evening event.

EVA London is July 5 - 7 but it looks like they don't have any receptions on July 7.  There are lots of other geek events around the same time, including That Camp London.

Location?

London.

A quiet pub or meeting room?  Wifi needed?  Breakout spaces? Whiteboards, drawing paper?  Depends on numbers, but a quiet pub, with drawing paper and possibly wifi should work (and be more relaxed than a meeting room).

Possible Topics for Discussion?

Has anyone implemented microformats or RDFa on their website? If so, what formats? What uptake/usage of the metadata has been seen?

RDFa vs microformats? Advantages of each?

Work-of-art microformat. Would a more generic microformat for man-made objects attract more interest?

What data could we potentially link to? Competiting resources - e.g. Geonames vs Getty Thes. of Geographic Names.

Any word of progress on the Collections Trust Terminology Server? Potentially a powerful resource to link to.

The chicken and egg problem - as a museum technologist, I can work towards getting machine-readable data available, but I'm not sure which formats and what data would be most useful. Without a critical mass of take-up for any one type, the benefits of any one data source are more limited for developers.  But museum seem to want a sense of where the critical mass is going to be so they can build for that.  How do we cut through this and come up with a sensible roadmap? [Mia]

I'm interested in hNews, but I know that's fairly specific to a contemporary science news project we're building. But maybe it'd be useful for museum blogs, press pages that release news stories? [Mia]

What's something we could work towards after the meeting?

• All contribute to pushing the discussion on a proposed microformat
• Encourage one manager/supplier of authority data to expose it as free linkable data
• Each have a trial project on one microformat/RDFa format and report back