And yet this is exactly what we found in our research of linked data at cultural institutions, 
including at national libraries. The institutions will often simply offer the data dump, and 
occasionally a SPARQL interface, with the expectation that users will know what to do with it 
and develop ways to display and use it. There were some institutions that were doing 
interesting things with their data like EUscreen. I did another unpublished study of academic 
repositories when I was interning at Columbia, but many just offered a link to the RDF or triples 
for records. A few that went a step further had one-off exhibition sites or projects that ultimately 
appeared to be abandoned. That said, it seems to be an interesting, untapped opportunity for 
digital humanities specialists.

Edelstein, J., Li-Madeo, C., Marden, J., Whysel, N. (2013). “Linked Open Data for Cultural 
Heritage: evolution of an information technology.” In Proceedings of the 31st ACM international 
conference on design of communication. Greenville, N.C.: Association for Machine Computing.
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2507103&CFID=433036479&CFTOKEN=60039815

Edelstein, J., Galla, L, Li-Madeo, C., Marden, J. Rhonemus, A., Whysel, N. (2013). “Linked 
Open Data for Cultural Heritage.” New York, NY: Pratt Institute. 
Abstract: This paper and the paper submitted to the ACM SIGDOC ’13 conference surveys the 
landscape of linked open data projects in cultural heritage, examining the work of groups from 
around the world. Traditionally, linked open data has been ranked using the five star method 
proposed by Tim Berners-Lee. We found this ranking to be lacking when evaluating how 
cultural heritage groups not merely develop linked open datasets, but find ways to use linked 
data to augment user experience. Building on the five-star method, we developed a six-stage 
life cycle describing both dataset development and dataset usage. We use this framework to 
describe and evaluate fifteen linked open data projects in the realm of cultural heritage.
http://www.whysel.com/papers/LIS670-Linked-Open-Data-for-Cultural-Heritage.pdf

Slides from ACM presentation
http://www.slideshare.net/nwhysel/linked-open-data-for-cultural-heritage-20479827

Noreen