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Read our articles on digital heritage infrastructure. Be aware that these posts have been automatically translated from Dutch by AI.

Sustainable links: why not everything that lasts should do everything
Background

Sustainable links: why not everything that lasts should do everything

Sustainable links sound like a technical choice until you realise the real problem is organisational: one infrastructure expected to support archiving, scholarly citation, and marketing at the same time. This blog walks through Handle, DOI, ARK, and even PURL—but above all through the underlying question: what are you allowed to promise permanently, and what do you only want to measure temporarily? The outcome is a surprisingly simple design rule: separate identity from attention.

Names That Endure: Persistent Identifiers Without the Illusion of Eternity
Background

Names That Endure: Persistent Identifiers Without the Illusion of Eternity

Links feel like concrete, until they suddenly turn to sand. In heritage data, that is not a detail but a risk: what works today may vanish tomorrow due to a new vendor, a reorganisation, or a change in leadership. In this blog, I show why a URL is not a promise, what a PID does deliver, and how minimal, sober infrastructure can build trust - without illusions of eternity. If your collections need to outlive your organisation, this is worth reading.

The Art of Getting Lost with AI
Background

The Art of Getting Lost with AI

In my attempt to install a simple analytics tool, I got tangled in a chain of seemingly plausible AI suggestions — each just convincing enough to continue. What began as a fifteen-minute task turned into hours of trying, correcting, and hoping the next step would work. It became a lesson in how language models simulate confidence, how easily you get swept along, and how important it remains to verify every step yourself.

What Are We Really Looking For? Dataset Discovery in the NDE Dataset Register on the Road to a Dataspace.
Opinion

What Are We Really Looking For? Dataset Discovery in the NDE Dataset Register on the Road to a Dataspace.

The third lesson learned from the Datahub Colonial Collections service platform.

The NDE Dataset Register is currently mainly a technical entry point to endpoints, but for a service platform like the Datahub Colonial Collections that is not enough. We need to understand what we are actually ingesting: the content, the technical quality, the legal conditions and the ethical sensitivities. By broadening discovery to these four lenses, the dataset register becomes a meaningful instrument that helps data providers publish responsibly and prepares service platforms for a dataspace logic.

Outside the Dataset, Within the Community: Enrichments as Nanopublications
Background

Outside the Dataset, Within the Community: Enrichments as Nanopublications

The second lesson from the Colonial Collections Datahub: enrichments must become independent, citable knowledge items.

The Datahub cannot store enrichments in its cache without losing them every night—nor without becoming an aggregator itself. Communities of origin also want their knowledge to exist outside Dutch infrastructure. This is why enrichments are published as standalone nanopublications: small, verifiable knowledge claims with their own provenance and licensing, distributed across an international network. The cache stays temporary, but the knowledge becomes durable, citable, and independent—exactly what reproducible and responsible infrastructure requires.

Cache, Not Copies: A Remedy Against Aggregation
Background

Cache, Not Copies: A Remedy Against Aggregation

The first blog with lessons learned from treating colonial collections as a service platform.

The Datahub lives on the rhythm of nightly synchronizations: every day the entire knowledge graph is rebuilt from scratch. Not to preserve it, but to remain deliberately disposable. A dataset that cannot be fully reconstructed from its source is an aggregate. By remaining fully reproducible, the Datahub prevents itself from becoming an authority and stays a service provider rather than a gatekeeper.

Service Platform Datahub Colonial Collections Part 3: from NDE Infrastructure to Dataspace
Background

Service Platform Datahub Colonial Collections Part 3: from NDE Infrastructure to Dataspace

The Datahub Colonial Collections automatically processes and publishes museum data according to NDE principles: technically correct, legally permitted, and transparently traceable. But when datasets include colonial-era objects or human remains, the question shifts from can we? to should we?

Responsible publication requires four frameworks: contextual, technical, legal, and ethical. In a European dataspace, these frameworks become enforceable protocols, enabling responsible and trustworthy data sharing with trust by design built into the infrastructure.

Service Platform Datahub Colonial Collections Part 2: Infrastructure and NDE Compliance
Background

Service Platform Datahub Colonial Collections Part 2: Infrastructure and NDE Compliance

In part 2 of the datahub as a service platform, we descend into the infrastructure beneath the Colonial Collections. Not the interface, but the agreements that determine who publishes which data, how it keeps flowing, and how close we stay to the source. We follow how museums publish their own data according to the NDE architecture, how the Datahub uses it without aggregating, and why enrichments are stored as independent knowledge instead of being hidden in an intermediate layer.

Service Platforms Are Not Data Layers — Time to Acknowledge That
Opinion

Service Platforms Are Not Data Layers — Time to Acknowledge That

Service platforms brim with creativity and improvisation, much like jazz musicians. But even in jazz, there is always a bass line holding everything together. In my response to the report 'Van Data naar Dienst', I explain why that role in our digital heritage infrastructure belongs to the broker. When we take that position seriously, platforms regain the freedom to do what they are best at.

Service Platform Datahub Colonial Collections Part 1: The User Environment
Background

Service Platform Datahub Colonial Collections Part 1: The User Environment

The Datahub for Colonial Collections is one of the first concrete examples of a dataspace in the heritage domain. In this infrastructure, collections from Dutch museums with a colonial context are brought together and enriched with knowledge from communities of origin — as with the Bird of Prophecy from Nigeria. The Datahub presents academic and local knowledge equally within a single shared system.

This Part 1 focuses on the user environment of the Datahub.

A Data Architecture Studio
Background

A Data Architecture Studio

Data are the raw material of the digital world. But just as steel, wood, or pigment gain value only through design and craftsmanship, data becomes meaningful only when given structure, context, and coherence. That is precisely the domain of a data architecture studio.