What is the Forward Linking Partnership?

Forward Linking brings together some of the largest providers of online cultural heritage with other cultural memory institutions, information professionals and digital scholarship experts to create a path towards a vibrant, sustainable cultural data ecosystem. Our goal is to make cultural linked data in Canada more amenable to research and scholarly insights: materials on websites of galleries, libraries, archives, museums (GLAM) are woefully siloed from each other and from other scholarly contexts.

The success of the semantic web for cultural data depends upon:

• the ongoing development of computer-legible persistent identifiers for real-world people, places, things, and concepts that are;
• easily connected through models responsive to scholarly nuance and;
• mobilized by tools and training that demonstrate the value of semantic web data creation and use.

Forward Linking is promoting these conditions through the pilot projects within the Persistent Identifier, Modelling, and Mobilizing research clusters.

Missing data and linked connections hamper interpretation, shackles researchers, and perpetuates biases and colonial legacies from older systems. Linked data allows researchers to address individual cultural artifacts via the web and to reference, annotate, and embed them within machine-readable scholarly conversations. Join us at conferences, workshops, and events, or peruse our publications to find out more about the Forward Linking team's use of linked data concepts, tools, and datasets across the heritage sector. 

What is Linked Data?

The stakes of bringing intersectional nuance to the world of linked data on the Semantic Web are high. Linked data is the format for adding source citations, meaning, and context to the Web. The Semantic Web is an extension of the World Wide Web, comprised of linked data, that makes the meaning of Web data machine readable--turning the Web itself into the equivalent of a queryable distributed database. Semantic Web data, or linked data, takes the form of that represent entities (real-world people, places, events, concepts etc.) connected to one another through relationships defined by an ontology (a set of computational rules that govern the type of relationships URIs can have to one another)

New to linked data? Forward Linking is affiliated with the Linked Infrastructure for Networked Cultural Scholarship project (LINCS, PI Susan Brown). We recommend the following primers:

• Linked Data Basic Concepts
• Introduction to Ontologiesa
• Linked Data Glossary

And if you are looking to make or draw on linked data as part of your research, we recommend the LINCS tools too.