A Systemic Approach for Effective Semantic Access to Cultural Content

Ilianna Kollia, Vassilis Tzouvaras, Nasos Drosopoulos and George Stamou

Presenter: Shima Dastgheib

Digital Cultural Heritage

Digital evolution of the Cultural Heritage Field has grown rapidly in the last few years

Books, photographs, audio-visual material, etc

a single point of access to European Cultural Heritage

semantic interoperability

What? The common automatic interpretation of the meaning of the exchanged information

Why? Diversity of content types and of metadata schemas used to annotate the content

Steps towards “common understanding”

a representation language that exchanges the formal semantics of the information:

RDF,OWL,SKOS reasoning tools, ontology querying

engines

mapping to a common data model

at the Europeana level: European Semantic Element (ESE) : Dublin

Core-based

European Data Model(EDM): enable the linking of data and to connect and enrich descriptions in accordance with the Semantic Web developments

Proposed System

To improve user experience, more detailed semantic description of content is needed.

Semantic query answering : answer queries based not only on string matching but also on implicit meaning Reasoning based on domain terminological

knowledge Content metadata is terminologically described and

semantically connected with other information The key is to semantically connect metadata with

ontological domain knowledge via appropriate mapping

System Architecture

EDM re-uses from the following namespaces

RDF and RDFS The OAI Object Reuse and Exchange

(ORE) SKOS The Dublin Core namespaces

Metadata Aggregation and Semantic Enrichment Workflow

Normalized Values

Metadata transform

ation

Ingested metadat

a

Aggregated

metadata

Semantic

repository

Harvesting,Deliv

ery

Schema Mapping

Value Mapping

Revision,Annotatio

n

Semantic Enrichme

nt

Query Answering

SPARQL (the W3C query language for RDF)

The answers are tuples of individuals stored in the semantic repository, satisfying the constraints expressed in the body of the query

Evaluation

Metadata aggregation Questionnaires, interviews

Query Answering: Computational cost is affordable with small

size knowledge base, but excessive when dealing with large scale data

Conclusion

All over the world, cultural institutions have been digitizing their collections of books, manuscripts, videos, etc

Different metadata schemas are used to annotate the digitized material

Europeana, provides access to the distributed content through collection of contributing metadata schemas.

semantic interoperability has a key role Scalability should be improved