MCN2015

In 2014 the Getty made public their Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN) dataset under the Open Commons Data Attribution License. This was an unqualified good thing and an example for the rest of the cultural heritage sector to follow. Unfortunately the data was released as "Linked Open Data" (LOD) and more specifically, in the case the complete dataset, a single 17GB RDF file thus rendering the data if not unusable then beyond the technical and infrastructure related means of almost anyone who might use it.This talk aims not to take the Getty to task but to use the release of the TGN dataset as an example for talking about the problems with Linked Open Data as it continues to be implemented in the cultural heritage sectors, tools and strategies for working with these datasets and alternative approaches going forward.