Object Thesaurus

One of the key aims of this project is to advance the standardisation of terminology and infrastructure within the museum sector to promote semantic and technical interoperability. This is deemed a significant advance for future museum information interoperability and one which would place Australia ahead of current international practice within the museums sector. The RIF-CS (Registry Information Format – Collections and Services) standard for translating museum collection descriptions for use within the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) will be used.

The aim is to establish a terminology service to serve the Australian collecting and research communities that stands in alignment with similar services already established internationally by the Getty Museum and OCLC with commonly used vocabularies. The Powerhouse Museum Object Name Thesaurus will be utilised through the project as follows:

• The collection descriptions gathered from the museum sector in the RIF-CS format will be enriched with a semantic layer through the addition of terminology from the Powerhouse Museum Object Name Thesaurus.
• The Object Name Thesaurus will be made available online as a web “terminology service” to museum data providers to integrate into their own collection information online and as a result enhance semantic access to their collection.
• To aim for further development of the terminology and structuring of the thesaurus through collaborative iterations and additions involving both researchers and museums.