Joined up thinking: linking and sharing Science Museum collections and content

<p>The Science Museum has much content online featuring its collections, objects&nbsp; and contextual stories, but this is fragmented across many websites and fails to add up to a credible and coherent online destination. It is known from our analytics that rich engagement with our online content takes place across the internet; on blogs, on twitter etc, but this engagement isn't reflected on our own web presence.</p><p>Our user-centred design process told us that users had relatively little interest in the data itself - their goal was content - but that the richness of the linkages our data could drive greatly increased the content's value. We set up a project to create aggregated content on our core website, interlinking it from various domains - archives and images, collections catalogues and content management systems - through its key ideas; allowing it to form a nexus for the wider conversations taking place around it.</p><p>As a result we have built a new infrastructure with linked open data at its heart. We have adopted a pragmatic ontological approach to maintain the integrity of our data sources, while leaving open the possibility of translating this for a greater variety of ontologies in the future. The result is an online product with an underlying data structure that combines two networks of linkages: a data-driven, structured, ontological one; and an organic one driven by user behaviour, creating a flexible platform with long term value - the simplest possible solution to a complex problem.</p>