The Dutch Digital Heritage Network (NDE) started in 2015 by the national cultural heritage institutions as a joint effort to improve the visibility, usability and sustainability of the cultural heritage collections maintained in the GLAM institutions. One of the goals is the realization of a distributed network of heritage information that no longer depends on aggregation of the data. This talk will focus on our approach for developing a new, cross-domain, decentralized discovery infrastructure for the Dutch heritage collections. A core element in our strategy is to encourage institutions to align their information with formal Linked Data resources for people, place, periods, concepts and to publish their data as Linked Open Data. The NDE program works on making all relevant terminology sources available as Linked Data and provide facilities for term alignment and building new thesauri. Another important goal is to provide means for browsing the collections in a cross-domain, user centric fashion. Based on possible relevant URIs identified in the user queries we want to be able to browse the available Linked Data in the cultural heritage network. The bi-directional use of Linked Data without aggregation is still a technological challenge. We decided to build a registry that records the back links for all the URIs used in our network. Next to Linked Data definitions of organizations and datasets we will also record fingerprints of the object descriptions. This information will provide the back links which make it possible to navigate from a term URI to the objects that have a relation with this term. We are currently developing a Proof-of-Concept and will show the first results at the SWIB conference. |