Creating a Knowledge Base to Research the History of UK Museums through Rapid Application Development

Abstract

Several studies have highlighted the absence of an integrated comprehensive dataset covering all of the UK’s museums, hence impeding research into the emergence, evolution, and wider impact of the UK’s museums sector. “Mapping Museums” is an interdisciplinary project aiming to develop a comprehensive database of UK museums in existence since 1960, and to use this to undertake an evidence-based analysis of the development of the UK’s museum sector during 1960--2020 and the links to wider cultural, social, and political concerns. A major part of the project has been the iterative, participatory design of a new RDF/S Knowledge Base to store data and metadata relating to the UK’s museums, and a Web Application for the project’s humanities scholars to browse, search, and visualise the data to investigate their research questions. This article presents the challenges we faced in developing the Knowledge Base and Web Application, our methodology and methods, the design and implementation of the system, and the design, outcomes, and implications of a user trial undertaken with a group of experts from the UK’s museums sector.

A geography of UK museums

“…Substantial efforts were required to define a comprehensive and yet clear and precise conceptualisation of museum attributes, and develop a formal ontology (Poulovassilis et al, 2019). For each museum, 24 attributes were collected, complemented by provenance attributes 5 .…”

“…Location refers to the physical geolocation of the museum's main buildings. The source is the museum postcode converted to latitude and longitude pairs through the ONS Postcode Lookup Dataset, and manually verified for accuracy (Poulovassilis et al, 2019). Museums generally have a single location, although some local authority museum services are umbrella groups that may be associated with multiple museums and locations 6 .…”

“…Particularly for the 2017 snapshot analysed in this paper, we are extremely confident in the completeness of the dataset, which includes all open museums. Substantial efforts were required to define a comprehensive and yet clear and precise conceptualisation of museum attributes, and develop a formal ontology (Poulovassilis et al, 2019). For each museum, 24 attributes were collected, complemented by provenance attributes.…”

Experiencia académica en desarrollo rápido de sistemas de información web con Python y Django

“…RAD representa un enfoque de desarrollo de software adaptativo con menos énfasis en la planificación del desarrollo y más énfasis en la producción y adaptación de prototipos (Poulovassilis et al, 2019). Las fases de RAD son: i) Planificación de requerimientos, ii) Diseño del usuario, iii) Construcción, iv) Transición.…”

Android Based Mobile Attendance System Application Online for on Site Engineers at PT. ZYX Indonesia

“…Metode ini ditujukan untuk menggabungkan isu-isu pengembangan standar seperti manajemen proyek, jaminan kualitas, dan pengujian perangkat lunak dengan exigencies perkembangan cepat [7]. Teknik RAD digunakan untuk menangani waktu projek yang singkat [8].…”