Linked, Open, Heterogeneous

Art, Data, and Business Duane Degler of Design For Context posted slides from his 5 April 2014 Museums and the Web talk, Design Meets Data (Linked, Open, Heterogeneous). Degler addresses what he calls the LAM (Libraries, Archives, Museums) Digital Information Ecosystem. I believe the same principles apply when businesses connect internal teams, external customers, external suppliers, and partners of all sorts as part of their Business Information Ecosystem. Read Degler's summary and slides, below:

"The tide of available information continues to rise. The opportunities that come from open access, linked data, sharing resources with other institutions, and standards-based data are enticing - and perhaps overwhelming?

Emerging design approaches help you find ways to make the most of your opportunities for new types of interactions and engagement with Information Objects. They focus on:

- Exploration, serendipity, use: Rich, relevant design requires an intimate understanding of information and the way people interact with it. It's more than attractive styling - although that's important. It's about people engaging in ways that stimulate the intellect and the experience. People need to find information, use it, relate other information to it, and share it for decades to come.

- Scalability, persistence, authority: Rich, relevant design also takes the long view. Understanding that the integrity of the information matters. This is increasingly important as we move toward more linked, open, and born digital cultural information.

Your institution becomes a gateway to an ecosystem of artistic imagery, scholarly insights, history, perspectives, and related objects. Other people will use your information to create new interpretations and works, which then build on what you hold. Curating information may be perceived as a burden (to be made easier!), yet it is a significant opportunity to reinforce the value and authority of institutions that enhance the information ecosystem."

Related

Dark Matter by Michael Peter Edson 19 May 2014. "The dark matter of the Internet is open, social, peer-to-peer and read/write—and it’s the future of museums" an important essay on the opportunity and mission for museums and cultural institutions: "We’re so accustomed to the scale of attention that we get from visitation to bricks-and-mortar buildings that it’s difficult to understand how big the Internet is—and how much attention, curiosity, and creativity a couple of billion people can have."

Thought Vectors - Vannevar Bush and Dark Matter (2014) Inspired by Michael Edson's essay. Just as Bush suggested in July 1945, I believe there's a need for people to act as explorers, guides, and trail blazers over knowledge they know and love. You can experience that personal knowledge and passion on a tour, at a talk, or in a conversation on a bus, at a party - anywhere you meet someone who loves one of these institutions. I think it's particularly valuable to have trail blazers who are also skilled professionals personally represent and communicate the values, knowledge, and heritage of their museum, just as a great reference librarian becomes a library's ambassador.

Reinventing the Web II (2014) Why isn't the Web a reliable and useful long term store for the links and content people independently create? What can we do to fix that? Who benefits from creating spaces with stable, permanently addressable content? Who pays? What incentives can make Web scale permanent, stable content with reliable bidirectional links and other goodies as common and useful as Web search over the entire flakey, decentralized and wildly successful Web?

Intertwingled Work (2010) No one Web service or collection of Web servers contain everything people need, but we get along using search and creative services that link content across wildly different sources. The same principal applies when you want to link and work across wildly diverse siloed systems of record and transactional databases.