About

Arts and Humanities Research Council funded Thinktank for 2006/7.

Primary collaborators:

The Museums Computer Group
MDA
24 Hour Museum
Department of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester
with strategic input from the Natural History Museum.

The semantic web is a set of related technologies which will make it easier to find and share information online. The objective of the Thinktank is, over a series of workshops, to identify the key challenges and opportunities for museums and to define how the culture sector should respond to them.

The Thinktank brought together experts from a wide range of disciplines, including museum policy and management, cataloguing and computational science. Over the ten months, a group of around 10 to 15 semantic web experts and museum professionals gathered in a series of closely documented meetings around the UK to explore the ways forward for the sector into this more digitally connected future.

The workshops were launched at an open meeting at the UK Museums on the Web Conference in Leicester on July 7, 2006.

The Semantic Web Thinktank worked until March 2007, producing a vision statement and workplan which will be disseminated throughout the sector. Full reports of activity were posted on the University of Leicester website.

The Semantic Web Thinktank falls under the project ‘UK Museums and the Semantic Web’, funded as part of the Arts & Humanities Research Council’s Research Workshops (Museums and Galleries) Scheme. For more information about the scheme visit http://www.ahrc.ac.uk/apply/research/research_networks_workshops.asp

For further information, or to interview a representative of the Thinktank, contact Ross Parry at rdp5@leicester.ac.uk.