SENESCHAL on the road

Towards the end of the SENESCHAL project a series of workshops were organised to engage with interested parties and project partners, to demonstrate the various outcomes of the project and to discuss possible future directions. The first of these workshop was held at the offices of Historic Scotland in Edinburgh on Thursday 13th February 2014. Despite severe winds and flooding significantly affecting travel plans the workshop went ahead and was attended by an engaged and enthusiastic group originating from a variety of organisations. From our point of view the Q&A was particularly fruitful, providing good insight into areas where people thought the Linked Data and web services approach might be particularly helpful.

The second of the three workshops was held at the Archaeology Data Service, King’s Manor, York on Thursday 20th February 2014. Once again an interested and engaged audience attended and there were stimulating discussions on all aspects of terminology usage. One significant topic of discussion concerned the use of HeritageData resources in applying validation and quality control to archaeological datasets to improve vocabulary usage.

The final workshop took place at the offices of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales (RCAHMW) in Aberystwyth on Thursday 27th February 2014. We observed examples of terminology usage within a number of online applications where SENESCHAL outcomes could potentially have a supporting role. The group were also understandably interested in future possibilities regarding multilingual vocabulary resources, following a demonstration illustrating how Scottish Gaelic terms had been incorporated into the RCAHMS Monument Types thesaurus.

Themes emerging from all workshop discussions included:
The need for more information on update procedures – how to keep the online Linked Data current
Connected with this, discussions on how versioning and version control techniques may apply
Useful ideas were expressed on possible additions to the web services and widgets initially made available

The presentation slides used in the workshops are available here (PDF, 3MB)