In the cultural heritage domain information systems are increasingly deployed, digital representations of physical objects are produced in immense numbers and there is a strong political pressure on memory institutions to make their holdings accessible to the public in digital form. The sector splits into a set of disciplines with highly specialized fields. Due to the resulting diversity, one can hardly speak about a “domain” in the sense of “domain ontologies” [33]. On the other side, study and research of the past is highly interdisciplinary. Characteristically, archaeology employs a series of “auxiliary” disciplines, such as archaeometry, archaeomedicine, archaeobotany, archaeometallurgy, archaeoastronomy, etc., but also historical sources and social theories.

Ontologies for Cultural Heritage

The Europeana Data Model (EDM) is a new approach towards structuring and representing data delivered to Europeana by the various contributing cultural heritage institutions. The model aims at greater expressivity and flexibility in comparison to the current Europeana Semantic Elements (ESE), which it is destined to replace. The design principles underlying the EDM are based on the core principles and best practices of the Semantic Web and Linked Data efforts to which Europeana wants to contribute. The model itself builds upon established standards like RDF(S), OAI-ORE, SKOS, and Dublin Core. It acts as a common top-level ontology which retains original data models and information perspectives while at

The Europeana Data Model (EDM)

Preservation of intangible cultural heritage, such as music and dance, requires encoding of background knowledge together with digitized records of the performances. We present an ontology-based approach for designing a cultural heritage repository for that purpose. Since dance and music are recorded in multimedia format, we use Multimedia Web Ontology Language (MOWL) to encode the domain knowledge. We propose an architectural framework that includes a method to construct the ontology with a labeled set of training data and use of the ontology to automatically annotate new instances of digital heritage artifacts. The annotations enable creation of a semantic navigation environment in a cultural heritage repository. We have demonstrated the efficacy of our approach by constructing an ontology for the cultural heritage domain of Indian classical dance, and have developed a browsing application for semantic access to the heritage collection of Indian dance videos.

Nrityakosha: Preserving the intangible heritage of Indian classical dance

There is an increasing demand for sharing learning resources between existing learning resource systems to support reusability, exchangeability, and adaptability. The learning resources need to be annotated with ontologies into learning objects that use different metadata standards. These ontologies have introduced the problems of semantic and structural heterogeneity. This research proposes a Semantic Ontology Mapping for Interoperability of Learning Resource Systems. To enable semantic ontology mapping, this research proposes conflict detection and resolution techniques for both semantic and structural conflicts. The Semantic Bridge Ontology has been proposed as a core component for generating mapping rules to reconcile terms defined in local ontologies into terms defined in the target common ontology. This work defines the reasoning rules to classify related learning objects to enhance the powerful deductive reasoning capabilities of the system. As a consequence, ontology-based learning object metadata are generated and used by the semantic query engine to facilitate user queries of learning objects across heterogeneous learning resource systems.

Semantic Ontology Mapping for Interoperability of Learning Resource Systems using a rule-based reasoning approach

Simple ontology alignments, largely studied in the literature, link a single entity of a source ontology to a single entity of a target ontology. One of the limitations of these alignments is, however, their lack of expressiveness which can be overcome by complex alignments. While diverse state-of-the-art surveys mainly review the matching approaches in general, to the best of our knowledge, there is no study about the specificities of the complex matching problem. In this paper, an overview of the different complex matching approaches is provided. It proposes a classification of the complex matching approaches based on their specificities (i.e., type of correspondences, guiding structure). The evaluation aspects and the limitations of these approaches are also discussed. Insights for future work in the field are provided.

Survey on complex ontology matching

Metadata interoperability is an active research area, especially for cultural heritage collections, which consist of heterogeneous objects described by a variety of metadata schemas. In this paper we propose an ontology-based metadata interoperability approach, which exploits, in an optimal way, the semantics of metadata schemas. In particular, we propose the use of CIDOC/CRM ontology as a mediating schema and present a methodology for mapping DC Type Vocabulary to CIDOC/CRM, demonstrating a real-world effort for ontology-based metadata integration.

/pdf/integrating-dublin-core-metadata-for-cultural-heritage-4441n7nsg0.pdf

Integrating Dublin Core metadata for cultural heritage collections using ontologies

In this paper, we propose an ontology-based metadata integration methodology for the cultural heritage domain. The proposed real - world approach considers an integration architecture in which CIDOC/CRM ontology acts as a mediating scheme. In this context, we present a mapping methodology from Encoded Archival Description (EAD) and Dublin Core (DC) metadata to CIDOC/CRM, and discuss the faced difficulties.

/pdf/ontology-based-metadata-integration-in-the-cultural-heritage-24dwhdut2a.pdf

Thomais Stasinopoulou

Papers

Integrating Dublin Core metadata for cultural heritage collections using ontologies

Ontology-based metadata integration in the cultural heritage domain

Ontology-Based Metadata Integration in the Cultural Heritage Domain