Publishing cultural heritage collections of Ghent with linked data event streams

Abstract

Cultural heritage institutions maintain digital artefacts of their collections using Collection Management Software (CMS). In order to attract new audiences, these data should be interoperable with and reusable within other Web APIs. In this article, we explain how we applied Flemish Linked Data Standards (OSLO) to make the data within the Axiell Collections CMS interoperable, and how we applied the method of Linked Data Event Streams (LDES) for making the data reusable. The LDES has been successfully adopted by third parties to then host subject pages, a SPARQL endpoint, a substring fragmentation for autocompletion purposes, and a IIIF enriched LDES. To this end, we see LDES as the core Web API of a CMS, allowing third parties to take up other querying and processing tasks on their own machines.