A place to record some of the discussion from the 'Linking Museums' meetup on July 7, 2010.  Please feel free to edit and add your notes, or comment on the page if that's easier for you.

I'd been desperately hoping I'd get away with not having to do any organising at the event, but I guess that was a bit unrealistic. In part because we needed to break up the tables to allow passage through the area, it seemed easiest to suggest 'birds of a feather'-style breakout discussions.  Possible topics were called out, written on A3 paper then grouped (where appropriate) and passed over to different parts of the room.

It would have been a good idea to nominate a time to have each group report back on their discussions, but I didn't think of it at the time.  This would also have given people a chance to easily move around between groups and start a different take on the same questions.

All paintings by Stubbs (or Boucher or Picasso)

Joe, Ian, Guys, Mia, Libby...

Why linked data (and various other meta discussions) including how much structure, how is it going to be used (for formats, types of data).

Loads of people!

Paul:

1. Get the raw data out there.

Interesting to hear from Jonty & Richard (museum hackers) - any data is better than no data. Museums, get your raw data out. Stop worrying about completing it and perfecting it. It will never be perfect and waiting until you think it is will stop other trying to do interesting things with it.

Jonty & Richard both said a full dump was more use to them than individual pages, as they'd only have to write routines to find/scrape every page otherwise. The full dump might not be as up to date as the dynamic pages. Museums could provide full dump plus feed of recent changes.

2. Implement basic web best practice.

Each thing should have a persistent structured web page. e.g. Each object, event, place, person documented. Structured could be plain HTML, which is again better than no data.

3. RDFa was seen has having a clearer direction, plus formats that were formally approved, than microformats. There was no obvious microformat for general museum objects.

4. Don't obsess about linked data yet. Until we embed structured data for our records there's no data to link from/to!

Why linked data/how's it going to be used - thoughts included better markup of search engine results (e.g. Google rich snippets), potentially link painting by same artist in different collections (possibly via intermediate person record page on common site such as Wikipedia), better structure for hackers to build visualisations on top of.

How much structure - keen users will make do with whatever is there, but structured metadata would increase ability of automated linking of pages.

Interestingness

I didn't get to talk to this group so I'm not sure what was discussed and who participated - if you were there, please let us know!

[Another one]

I think Shelley has the notes for this...

What next?

Regular meetups, a mailing list?  What works for you (and do you want to help?)