On April 21, Abby Sypniewski and Clayton Zimmerman presented their project, Connecting Communities to Museum Objects with Linked Open Data, at the UMSI Student Project Exposition, which highlights projects across the School of Information. Abby and Clayton spent the winter semester working with UMMAA collections managers Andrea Blaser and Jim Moss to identify a way to expand the reach of UMMAA's cataloged data. Cultural museums do not have an agreed upon nomenclature or cataloging system that allows their data to be easily aggregated and searched across institutions. The natural sciences use aggregators like the Animal Diversity Web and VertNet. Using Linked Open Data, Abby and Clayton demonstrated how UMMAA's data could get picked up by World Cat and other potential aggregators as the use of Linked Open Data continues to expand.
