SEMANTIC WEB AND CULTURAL HERITAGE

WHAT IS THE SEMANTIC WEB?

The Semantic Web is a web of methods and technologies that allow machines to read and understand the meaning of information on the internet

SEMANTICS= MEANING Intended as a real Web, where data is

connected through meaning, in accessible ways in a limited location

Conceived by Tim Berners-Lee as a continuation of the the current Internet.

Monitored and promoted by the W3 consortium

WHAT IS THE SEMANTIC WEB?

The Semantic Web will organize information in conceptual spaces according to its meaning; the current web suffers in searching information (with keyword-based searching), extracting relevant data across documents and outdated information.

Semantic Web seeks to have an automated design to support maintenance.

In order for it to work, there needs to be integration, standardization, and adaptation by the users.

RDF – RESOURCE DESCRIPTION FRAMEWORK

RDF allows for a common framework where data from various sources can merge. It takes two URIs and shows the relationship between them.

Showing relationships is key: For example, in a regular search if you enter the keyword "Harry Potter" it has no way of knowing whether "Harry Potter" is the creator, character, related term etc. in relation to the results.

Using RDF, the relations are coded in the results giving them meaning.

It is based on the concept of triples- subject, predicate, object

RDF

Here are the Triples:

Harry Potter <hasPet> HedwigHarry Potter <hasEmail> harrypotter@hogwarts.net

SIMPLE KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION SYSTEM (SKOS)

SKOS is a standard set of languages and elements that are used as framework for thesauri, taxonomies, folksonomies, and subject-heading systems.

Built upon RDF and RDFS Can be used with OWL Aims to be a more simple and intuitive set of

standards Maintained by World Wide Web Consortium

(WSC)

SKOS ELEMENTS

Main element is Concept Units of thought - Objects, ideas, meanings, and

events Labels

Preferred Lexical Labels Alternative Lexical Labels Hidden Lexical Labels

Semantic Relationships Broader/Narrower Relationships Associative Relationships

Documentary Notes

SKOS EXAMPLE (RDF TURTLE)

ex:birds rdf:type skos:Concept; skos:prefLabel "birds"@en; skos:preflabel “aves”@sp;skos:altLabel "animals"@en;skos:hiddenLabel "burds"@en;skos:broader “creatures”@enskos:narrower “winged”@enskos:related “ornithology”@enskos:examples “robin, sparrow, chicken”@enskos:editorial note “edited on 4/2/10”@en

SKOS EXAMPLE

SKOS ONTOLOGY EXAMPLE

WEB ONTOLOGY LANGUAGE: OWL

Semantic web requires more expressiveness than what RDF can offer; OWL is a richer vocabulary description language.

Allows for greater machine interoperability of information on the web.

OWL is being positioned to be the standardized language for the Semantic Web, as identified by W3C.

Web Ontology Language is used to process the content of information instead of just presenting it on a web page.

WEB ONTOLOGY LANGUAGE: OWL

OWL describes the meaning of terminology used in a document; it adds onto the vocabulary existing in the RDF Schema (which describes properties and classes of RDF resources).

For example, RDF cannot describe relations between classes or cardinality constraints like OWL (like Hogwarts students have at most, one pet) can.

OWL needs to have a well-defined syntax, expressive power, and efficient reasoning capabilities.

OWL

Description of the class of student wizards

Horrocks, I. (2008). Ontologies and the semantic web. Communications of the ACM. vol.51, no.12 p.58-67. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier

ONTOLOGY

An ontology like OWL gives a shared understanding of a domain, which is needed in overcoming differences in terminologies.

It will improve accuracy of searches and interpret retrieved information from a search.

The development of Semantic Web would be gradual; in addition, there must be compatibility between agents that use OWL and those that use RDF (at least partly): information that is written at a higher level (OWL) must be interpreted by agents that can also recognize RDF-written information.

A NOTE ON METADATA Cultural heritage collections are indexed with

metadata obtained from thesauri like Iconclass and Getty’s Vocabularies (Art and Architecture Thesaurus, Union List of Artist Names, Thesaurus of Geographic Names, and Cultural Objects Name Authority). Additionally, SKOS helps to enable production of controlled vocabularies for the semantic web.

These vocabularies are not unified (although overlap does exist), so browsing many collections in an interoperable way becomes difficult.

Metadata and vocabularies must be depicted in RDF and/or OWL.

Forming semantic links between different resources is ontology mapping.

USE OF THESAURI/VOCABULARIES

Many of these collections and projects use the same thesauri – Getty Vocabularies and Iconclass. Give authoritative information and strengthen access to databases.

Getty Vocabularies consist of the Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT), Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN), The Cultural Objects Name Authority (CONA), and The Union List of Artist Names (ULAN). These give structured vocabulary for names, descriptions, titles biographies, and various information on art, architecture, important places, works of art and artists, respectively.

Iconclass describes and classifies information on subjects (icons) that are depicted in works of art. A hierarchically ordered collection/classification system.

CULTURAL HERITAGE

Cultural heritage is the legacy of culture inherited from previous generations of a particular group or society

Tangible Artifacts, monuments, graves, and buildings.

Intangible Language, rituals, traditions, stories, and oral

histories.

BENEFITS

Preservation Access Further exploration Ability to create relationships within and

across collections Patrons can conduct meaningful searches Possible to build collections containing items

from different institutions

BENEFITS

How exactly does the Semantic Web create a “meaningful” search? For example, semantic links can be created that allow the user to: Find a painting of an historic event, find

information on that event along with other artwork depicting it, locate it on a map and see where nearby events occurred and how they are represented in artwork.

Look up at artist, see where this artist lived and worked, and see works by other artists that lived nearby at the time, or apprentices of that artist.

Find additional written reports on events, historical figures or iconography shown in a cultural heritage collection.

EUROPEANA

A collection of paintings, music, films and books from some of Europe’s leading galleries, museums, libraries and archives. Over 14 million items currently.

The Louvre, British Library, and Rijksmuseum are predominately featured, along with around 1500 smaller institutions.

Europeana’s goal is to make Europe’s cultural heritage accessible to the public.

EUROPEANA Data is linked together for semantic searching. Currently, the semantic search is a research

prototype.

EUROPEANA

EUROPEANA – THE CURRENT CATALOG

CULTURESAMPOHTTP://WWW.KULTTUURISAMPO.FI/

20 Finnish museums, libraries, archives and other memory organizations, as well as data imported from websites with 18 different original schemas.

CULTURESAMPO- CONT.

Features Summary

Map Search (historic and current)

Faceted results Timeline Person relations Semantic Wikipedia Biographies

o Various Entry Points

o Autocompletion

o Visualizations

o Cross language searches

o Timeline

STITCH @ CATCHSEMANTIC INTEROPERABILITY TO ACCESS CULTURAL HERITAGE

Develop theories, tools and methods needed for metadata interoperability.

Trying to develop methods to find semantic links for the purpose of access to various repositories that are indexed with diverse vocabularies (like AAT and Iconclass).

Collaborating with: The French National Library: Uses SKOS and

linked data to give access to the collection’s subject vocabulary.

Rijksmuseum: Integrating access to the Masterpieces Collection.

MULTIMEDIAN N9C E-CULTURE PROJECT

The objective of this project is to give multimedia access to cultural heritage collections.

E-culture “demonstrators” will be developed to give semantic information access and multimedia visualization between collections in the Netherlands. A cultural search engine will be produced.

Uses Getty’s Thesauri, Rijksmuseum concepts/locations/people and SCVN (Dutch ethnology) and searches across Rijksmuseum, Archive.com, Museum Volkenkunde, and Tropenmuseum.

MULTIMEDIAN N9C E-CULTURE PROJECT

Features include a map for geographic visualization for works and charts. Both are in the nascent stages of development.

CHIP (CULTURAL HERITAGE INFORMATION PRESENTATION)

Funded by the Dutch Science Foundation. Collaboration with Rijksmuseum. The project is determining how semantic web can be used to build Rijksmuseum’s vocabulary. Another goal is to provide semantic recommendations and better browsing and searching.

Uses Getty Vocabularies and Iconclass.

CHIP (CULTURAL HERITAGE INFORMATION PRESENTATION) 3 tools have been developed within the

semantic web model Artwork Recommender: Semantically-powered

tool, rates artwork for a user’s profile Tour Wizard: Personal virtual tour for the user. Mobile Tour: Mapping a virtual tour within the

physical space of the museum. Guide users through collections via mobile devices.

Create a user profile, can label topics you do not like or like, view information on artists and artworks.

CHIP (CULTURAL HERITAGE INFORMATION PRESENTATION)

CHIP (CULTURAL HERITAGE INFORMATION PRESENTATION)

CHIP (CULTURAL HERITAGE INFORMATION PRESENTATION)

CHIP (CULTURAL HERITAGE INFORMATION PRESENTATION)

CULTURAL HERITAGE OF CANTABRIA

W3C Case Study by the Fundación Marcelino Botín

11 types of cultural heritage items from 300 sources about Cantabria, Spain.

Using semantic technologies remedies the spread of data in various forms, and digitization processes.

Increases access to all citizens by creating a repository for cultural heritage

CANTABRIAHTTP://193.144.180.22:8080 Prototype in Spanish Features maps, timeline, user-generated wiki,

faceted browsing and search results, tourist guide

CHALLENGES WITH CANTABRIA

Problems are not technology related, but rather political

Search results and data were skewed towards certain areas or people within Cantabria

CHALLENGES AND THE FUTURE OF CULTURAL HERITAGE COLLECTIONS

Large variety of objects- who has ownership? Who can give metadata, label authority files? Currently, only prototypes are available for

searching cultural heritage collections semantically. Will people come around to the idea of Semantic Web?

QUESTIONS

Is the Semantic Web a realistic goal? How will it be implemented? What challenges do you foresee? Is cultural heritage a realistic area to show

semantically? What about other areas- travel, health, business, social media

BIBLIOGRAPHY Angjeli, A., Isaac, A., Cloarec, T., Martin, F., Meij, L., Matthezing, H., & Schloback, S. (2009).

Semantic Web and Vocabulary Interoperability: an Experiment with Illumination Collections. International Cataloguing and Bibliographic Control, 38(2), 25-9.

Retrieved from Library Lit & Inf Full Text database Antoniou, G. & van Harmelen, F. (2004). A semantic web primer. Cambridge,

Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Brynko, B. (2010) The power of the semantic web. Information Today. no5 p. 10. CHIP @ Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. (2008). CHIP (Cultural Heritage Information

Presentation) Homepage. Retrieved from http://chip-project.org/ Concordia, C., Gradmann, S., & Siebinga, S. (2010). Not just another portal, not just

another digital library: A portrait of Europeana as an application program interface. IFLA Journal, 36(1), 61-9. doi: 10.1177/0340035209360764

CultureSampo (2010). Finnish culture on the semantic web 2.0. Retrieved from http://www.kulttuurisampo.fi/?lang=en

Doszkocs, T. (2010 July/August). Semantic search engines mean well. Online Magazine vol34 no 4. p.36-42.

Dunsire, Gordon. (2008). Said the spider to the fly: identity and authority and the semantic web. (based on keynote at CIG conference 2008, Glasgow) Manchester: CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group.

Europeana Foundation. (2010). Europeana. Retrieved from http://www.europeana.eu/portal/ index.html

Fundacion Marcelino Botin (2009). Patrimonio de Cantabria: todo el patrimonio cultural y natural de Cantabria. Retrieved from http://193.144.180.22:8080/web/guest/

home Getty’s Research Institute. (2010). Getty Vocabularies. Retrieved from

http://www.getty.edu/ research/tools/vocabularies/index.html

BIBLIOGRAPHY Herman, I. (2010, June 22). Introduction to semantic web technologies. Retrieved

from http://www.w3.org/2010/Talks/0622-SemTech-IH/Tutorial.pdf Hernandez, Francisca. (2007, May). Case study: An ontology of Cantabria’s Cultural

Heritage. Retrieved from http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/sweo/public/UseCases/ FoundationBotin/

Horrocks, I. (2008). Ontologies and the semantic web. Communications of the ACM. vol.51 no.12 p.58-67 Retrieved from Academic Search Premier

Iconclass. (2010). Retrieved from http://www.iconclass.nl/ McGuinness, D. L. & van Harmelen, F. (Eds.). (2009). OWL web ontology language

overview. Retrieved from http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-owl-features-20040210/

Miles, A. & Bechhofer,S. (2009). SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization Reference. Retrieved from http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-reference/

MultimediaN N9C E-culture Project. (2008). MultimediaN N9C Eculture project homepage. Retrieved from http://e-culture.multimedian.nl/

Rapoza, J. (2004, June 4). Spinning the semantic web. Eweek Labs. www.eweek.com

Schreiber, G., Amin, A., Aroyo, L., Van Assem, M., de Boer, V., et al. (2008). Semantic annotation and search for cultural heritage collecitons: The MultimediaN

E- Culture demonstrator. Web semantics: Science, Services, and Agents on the World Wide Web 6. Elsevier. p.243-249. doi:10.1016/j.websem.2008.08.001

Solanki, M. Semantic web in cultural heritage and archaeology [SlideShare slides]. Retrieved from http://www.slideshare.net/nimonika/semantic-web-in-

cultural- heritage-and-archaeology STITCH @ CATCH. (2005). Semantic interoperability to access cultural heritage.

Retrieved from http://www.cs.vu.nl/STITCH/index.html

SEMANTIC WEB AND CULTURAL HERITAGERYAN MCCOMAS, LAURA OCHOA PODELL, ARIA PIERCEKNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION FALL 2010LIS 653.03 DR. PATTUELLI

Using Semantic web with Cultural Heritage Collections:

Europeana

http://www.europeana.eu

Culture Sampo

http://kultturisampo.fi

Cantabria

http://193.144.180.22:8080/web/guest/home

STITCH@CATCH

http://www.cs.vu.nl/STITCH/index.html

MultimediaN N9C E-Culture

http://e-culture.multimedian.nl/

CHIP

http://chip-project.org/index.html

Goals of Semantic Web:

Allows for machines to connect meaning to data

Benefits- Increases access, allows for meaningful searches, connects various points of entry, FRBRized and faceted

Challenges- data needs to be entered and standardized, lots of human work, privacy

Citations

Antoniou, G. & van Harmelen, F. (2004). A semantic web primer. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Brynko, B. (2010) The Power of the semantic web. Information Today. no5 p. 10.

Schreiber, G., Amin, A., Aroyo, L., Van Assem, M., de Boer, V., et al. (2008). Semantic annotation and search for cultural heritage collecitons: The MultimediaN E-Culture demonstrator. Web semantics: Science, Services, and Agents on the World Wide Web 6. Elsevier. p.243-249.  doi:10.1016/j.websem.2008.08.001