Robert Sanderson: Building Yale’s Cultural Heritage Knowledge Graph – Episode 46

Описание: Robert Sanderson

Yale University manages huge collections of precious cultural heritage artifacts housed in multiple museums, libraries, and other collections.

Using knowledge graph and ontology engineering design patterns that he has developed over his career, Robert Sanderson helps scholars, researchers, and the general public access information about — and make connections across — millions of unique items in Yale's collections

We talked about:

his work as Senior Director for Digital Cultural Heritage at Yale University
the knowledge graph and ontology engineering design patterns that guide his work
the scope of his work — improving discoverability of Yale's extensive collections of artifacts, facilitating the management of collection information, and even collecting data on physical artifact storage facilities
how their linked data approach lets researchers easily connect information about artifacts and information housed in multiple museums, libraries, and collections
how the growth of LLMs has affected their KG user interfaces
how AI is accelerating their ability to add to their knowledge graph the millions of artifacts in their collections that aren't yet accounted for
the compact nature of their three-billion-triple KG ontology, just 10 classes and 50 relationships
the extensive vocabularies and taxonomies they use
how they handle the need to reconcile the identity of lesser-known people who don't have a Wikipedia page or other authoritative references available
how they balance the competing needs of comprehensiveness and usability as they build their knowledge graph
how knowledge graphs facilitate discoveries that other search tools can't
current opportunities for post-docs to join his team to work on leading-edge AI projects

Robert's bio
Dr. Robert Sanderson is the Senior Director for Digital Cultural Heritage at Yale University, where he works with the libraries, archives, and museums to ensure that data and other digital efforts are coherent and connected. He is the principal architect for Yale’s cross-collection discovery system, LUX, which is built on the Linked Art specifications, for which he is an editor. He is also an editor for the IIIF specifications, was the co-chair and editor for JSON-LD and the Web Annotation data model in the W3C. He has previously worked at the Getty in Los Angeles, Stanford University, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the University of Liverpool. His current areas of work and research are at the intersections of cultural heritage, knowledge graphs, data usability, and generative AI.
Connect with Rob online

LinkedIn
email: robert dot sanderson at yale dot edu

Rob's LinkedIn post series on KG and ontology design patterns

The 10 Design Principles to Live By
Ontology Design Patterns
Naming Things
Avoiding Reification
Foundational Ontologies
Multiple Inheritance, Not Multiple Instantiation
Predicate Reuse... Meh
Document your ABCs
Separate Query and Description Semantics
Usable vs Complete
acknowledgements

Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:

   • Robert Sanderson: Building Yale's Cultural...  


Podcast intro transcript
This is the Knowledge Graph Insights podcast, episode number 46. When your job is to help scholars and the public discover information about millions of cultural heritage artifacts that are housed in multiple museums, libraries, and other collections, you need a powerful — but also manageable — knowledge graph. That's Rob Sanderson's role at Yale University. He and his team apply time-tested ontology and knowledge engineering design patterns to help people discover — and see the connections between — these precious human artifacts.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 46 of the Knowledge Graph Insights Podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show Robert Sanderson. Rob is a professor and the senior director of Digital Cultural Heritage at Yale University, the Ivy League School in Connecticut. Welcome to the show, Rob. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days.

Rob:
Hi, Larry. Thank you so much for inviting me to be part of the illustrious lineup of guests on your podcast. So yeah, I'm Rob Sanderson, as you said, Senior Director for Digital Cultural Heritage at Yale. So I work with the libraries, the archives, and the museums and other collecting organizations at Yale to help them to be more connected with linked data organizationally and more coherent in the way that we do things digitally. So our projects really focus on discovery and access to the collections in service of the university mission, which of course is teaching and learning, research, and preparing our students to be the next generation of leaders in the world.

Rob:
So for that, the university invests very heavily in the collections, which is fantastic. We are super proud of the 300 years of collecting that we've done. But we want to make sure that if you can'...