RKDartists as Linked Open Data

Linked Open Data

Museums, archives and researchers often require information on artists and collectors in order to be able to process their collection data. Those responsible for registering and archiving the data often have to enter this information manually. This is not only time consuming, but the information also has to be updated regularly as new data is found on a regular basis when new archive research has been carried out.

It is much more efficient to use a central source to access this data. Creating and updating data is not the only advantage that such a central source offers. It also allows files and data from museums, archives and research institutes to be linked, offering a semantic web of cultural heritage information. This data can then be linked and shared by way of a standard known as Linked Open Data (LOD). This standard stipulates the structure to be used to present your data so that the information can remain freely available 'forever' under a permanent address (uri). Information published as Linked Open Data forms stable building blocks to which you are free to link your own files. Linked Open Data forms one of the pillars of the Netwerk Digitaal Erfgoed (NDE), the joint information landscape of the heritage sector in the Netherlands. The website is a term network, a service offered by the NDE which gives access to the LOD sources gathered.

The RKD shares bibliographical data in RKDartists with the world as Linked Open Data and in doing so follows the NDE Term network. A lot of information on persons or companies in RKDartists is also shared with the world via LOD. Below you can find the technical and functional instructions for using the LOD service and the data from RKDartists.

License

RKD made the RKDartists LOD available under the 'Open Data Common Attribution License (ODC-BY) version 1.0'. The Open Knowledge Foundation has published the following summary of the conditions to use the service and data under this license.

Therefore, it is free to use the RKD LOD data as long as you attribute. 

The RKD recommends you do so by linking back (deep link) to the RKDartists records in the original RKDartists context. You can link back by using the following url: https://data.rkd.nl/artists/#number#.

For example: Source: https://data.rkd.nl/artists/66219

By linking back you make a connection to the complete context of the data including the sources for the data. We believe this type of attribution is the best way to justify the idea of LOD. Click here for more details about the license.

Which RKDartists data are available as LOD?

All persons and institutes included in RKDartists are accessible as LOD. The most important elements such as 'preferred name', 'name variations', 'gender', 'nationality/school', 'places and dates of birth and death', all essential biographical data to connect to your own data, are available in the widely used metadata standard schema.org. A list of all elements available in schema.org can be found in this data story.

Elements such as 'teacher', 'pupil', and 'sources’ and are not available in schema.org. To do justice to the semantic nuance of the RKDartists dataset, these elements have been modelled following the Linked Art implementation of the CIDOC-CRM standard. This data story describes, with examples, how to combine the schema.org and Linked Art data.

As mentioned under 'license' you are free to use our data, but please link back to our data in RKDartists. By linking your data to RKDartists you connect your data in the semantic web and your data are connected to the complete data context in RKDartists. You can connect your data by using the following url: https://data.rkd.nl/artists/#number#.

Persistent URI to retrieve biographical data from RKDartists

All information about persons and institutes in RKDartists can be retrieved with a persistent identifier. This persistent identifier is constructed as follows: https://data.rkd.nl/artists/#number#. The number in the uri is identical to the number in the permalink at the bottom of the screen in the detail presentation in the RKDartists web interface:

For example, the persistent identifier to retrieve the biographical record of Rembrandt can be found in the permalink, for Rembrandt the number is 66219. So the uri http://data.rkd.nl/artists/66219 returns the biographical data for Rembrandt.

The uri supports 'content negotiation'. This means that the same uri executed from a web browser returns the 'human readable' page for Rembrandt in RKD Research, while this uri executed in a software code returns data in RDF. This returns all triples from the RKD Knowledge Graph that have the requested URI as subject. 

You can use a command line utility such as cURL to retrieve data in different standards.

It is also possible to request these formats by directly using a file extension on the URI. For example: https://data.rkd.nl/artists/66219.ttl.