Free your metadata

Suppose you have a son or daughter who has to write a school assignment on the works of Da Vinci. How handy it would be if the apple of your eye could have a look on line at all the collections of the different museums from all over the world, see which museum has which works and whether there is detailed information available for each painting or work of art.

This information on information is sometimes called metadata. It tells us how old a painting is, who the author of a book is and what appears on a 19th-century photograph.

For now, this is still in the future because that would mean that all museums make such information generally available, which is not yet the case. That is why IBBT-MMLab-UGent (Multimedia Lab at Ghent University) and ULB (Université Libre de Bruxelles) joined forces and launched “Free your metadata”. This initiative explains to museums and libraries how they must deal with their metadata.

By using Google Refine, “Free your metadata” shows how, in 3 easy steps, museums and libraries can publish their metadata and make it accessible to everyone.

1. Clean your metadata 
   The first thing that the museum employee must do is give the data a good spring clean: by doing so, little mistakes in a large set of data are corrected semi-automatically. Google refine enables you to remove empty or double rows in the data set, split cells, etc.
   
2. Reconcile your metadata
   The aim of “uniting” the metadata is to connect own names for a specific collection with a more regulated terminology on the Web. For example, does the name “instrument” refer to a musical instrument or a measuring instrument?
   
3. Link your metadata
   Your collection thereby becomes part of the “Linked data Cloud”: and this ensures that collections are no longer small islands but form part of the inter-linked Web. For example, it is possible to have applications that transgress the boundaries of 1 collection (you can then search in 1 museum’s collection but find related objects in another’s collection).

The Powerhouse Museum in Australia is one of the pioneers in making metadata available. That is why the people from “Free your metadata” use the data set of their museum for all their tests and to demonstrate the system to external people.

Ruben Verborgh, co-founder of Free your metadata: “Very often museums and libraries do not want to publish anything that is not 100% correct or complete, and, in the case of metadata, striving for completeness is somewhat over-ambitious. What we actually want to do with this process is give these institutions a number of best practices on how they can deal with their metadata.”

 Check out the "Free your metadata" introduction video: