Online event-based conservation documentation: A case study from the IIC website

There is a wealth of conservation-related resources that are published online on institutional and personal websites. There is value in searching across these websites, but this is currently impossible because the published data do not conform to any universal standard. This paper begins with a review of the types of classifications employed for conservation content in several conservation websites. It continues with an analysis of these classifications and it identifies some of their limitations that are related to the lack of conceptual basis of the classification terms used. The paper then draws parallels with similar problems in other professional fields and investigates the technologies used to resolve them. Solutions developed in the fields of computer science and knowledge organization are then described. The paper continues with the survey of two important resources in cultural heritage: the ICOM-CIDOC-CRM and the Getty vocabularies and it explains how these resources can be combined in the field of conservation documentation to assist the implementation of a common publication framework across different resources. A case study for the proposed implementation is then presented based on recent work on the IIC website. The paper concludes with a summary of the benefits of the recommended approach. An appendix with a selection of classification terms with reasonable coverage for conservation content is included

Applications of the ACGT Master Ontology on Cancer

In this paper we present applications of the ACGT Master Ontology (MO) which is a new terminology resource for a transnational network providing data exchange in oncology, emphasizing the integration of both clinical and molecular data. The development of a new ontology was necessary due to problems with existing biomedical ontologies in oncology. The ACGT MO is a test case for the application of best practices in ontology development. This paper provides an overview of the application of the ontology within the ACGT project thus far

The Development of the Language of Bindings Thesaurus

Bookbindings have long been the Cinderella of the bibliographical world, mostly ignored unless extensively decorated, and the reason most often given for this by cataloguers and bibliographers has been the absence of any consistent and recognized terminology with which to describe them, especially those bindings which have little or no decoration. There are many reasons why no such terminology had been created, but a lack of serious research, the confusion inherent in inherited and inconsistent terminologies, and a general lack of the expertise required to recognize different structures and materials were chief among them. This has not been helped by the antiquarian book trade, which has over the past century and a half developed its own highly idiosyncratic and inconsistent, if not actually inaccurate, terminologies. Traditional bookbinding terms in English, as they have come down to us, refer mostly to nineteenth- century binding practice, as the ϐirst bookbinding manual in English dates only from 1811, and the terms used are therefore not necessarily helpful in describing earlier bookbinding practices. The emergence after the disastrous ϐloods in Florence in 1966 of the distinct discipline now known as book conservation made the creation of such comprehensive and consistent terminology essential, as recording the distinctive features of bookbindings and their condition was a necessary part of book conservation. A small number of book conservators went on to do further research into historical book structures, extending and reϐining the newly created terminology and giving precise meanings to traditional terms that had often been used very loosely up to that date. Unfortunately, the new terms coined in this process by different researchers were not themselves always consistent, with the inevitable risk of creating further confusion rather than reducing it. As, however, more extensive use was made of databases to record such details, the need for consistency in the form of a standardized thesaurus became ever more pressing

Adaptation of NLP Techniques to Cultural Heritage Research and Documentation

The WissKI system provides a framework for ontology based science communication and cultural heritage documentation. In many cases, the documentation consists of semi-structured data records with free text fields. Most references in the texts comprise of person and place names, as well as time specifications. We present the WissKI tools for semantic annotation using controlled vocabularies and formal ontologies derived from CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM). Current research deals with the annotations as building blocks for event recognition. Finally, we outline how the CRM helps to build bridges between documentation in different scientific disciplines

The CIDOC CRM, an Ontological Approach to Schema Heterogeneity

The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM), now ISO/CD21127, is a core ontology that aims at enabling information exchange and integration between heterogeneous sources of cultural heritage information, archives and libraries. It provides semantic definitions and clarifications needed to transform disparate, heterogeneous information sources into a coherent global resource, be it within a larger institution, in intranets or on the Internet. It is argued that such an ontology is property-centric, compact and highly generic, in contrast to terminological systems. The presentation will demonstrate how such a well-crafted core ontology can help to achieve a very high precision of schema integration at reasonable cost in a huge, diverse domain. It is further argued that such ontologies are widely reusable and adaptable to other domains which makes their development cost effective

MetaNet: a metadata term thesaurus to enable semantic interoperability between metadata domains

Metadata interoperability is a fundamental requirement for access to information within networked knowledge organization systems. The Harmony International Digital Library Project [1] has developed a common underlying data model (the ABC model) to enable the scalable mapping of metadata descriptions across domains and media types. The ABC model, described in [2], provides a set of basic building blocks for metadata modeling and recognizes the importance of 'events' to unambiguously describe metadata for objects with a complex history. In order to test and evaluate the interoperability capabilities of this model, we applied it to some real multimedia examples and analysed the results of mapping from the ABC model to various different metadata domains using XSLT [3]. This work revealed serious limitations in XSLT's ability to support flexible dynamic semantic mapping. In order to overcome this, we developed MetaNet [4], a metadata term thesaurus which provides the additional semantic knowledge which is non-existent within declarative XML-encoded metadata descriptions. This paper describes MetaNet, its RDF Schema [5] representation and a hybrid mapping approach which combines the structural and syntactic mapping capabilities of XSLT with the semantic knowledge of MetaNet, to enable flexible and dynamic mapping among metadata standards

ArCo: the Italian Cultural Heritage Knowledge Graph

ArCo is the Italian Cultural Heritage knowledge graph, consisting of a network of seven vocabularies and 169 million triples about 820 thousand cultural entities. It is distributed jointly with a SPARQL endpoint, a software for converting catalogue records to RDF, and a rich suite of documentation material (testing, evaluation, how-to, examples, etc.). ArCo is based on the official General Catalogue of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities (MiBAC) - and its associated encoding regulations - which collects and validates the catalogue records of (ideally) all Italian Cultural Heritage properties (excluding libraries and archives), contributed by CH administrators from all over Italy. We present its structure, design methods and tools, its growing community, and delineate its importance, quality, and impact

Ontologijos ir technologiniai sprendimai skaitmeninio kultūros paveldo integravimui ir prieigai: Lietuvos patirtis

 Web technologies are the key for the implementing and ensuring the full range of user needs in the digital age. On the other hand, the issue of unified representation of digital content from diverse memory institutions in order to ensure semantic integrity still remains a matter of urgency. Semantic interoperability of information and data is essential in an integrated system. In this paper, we analyze and describe an ontology-based metadata interoperability approach and how this approach could be applied for memory institution data from diverse sources which do not support ontologies. In particular, we describe the use of the CIDOC CRM ontology as a mediating schema within Lithuania’s Information System of the Virtual Electronic Heritage (hereinafter ”VEPIS”) The paper introduces the role of the CIDOC CRM based Thesaurus of Personal Names, Geographical Names and Historical Chronology (hereinafter “BAVIC”), which operates as a core ontology within VEPIS by allowing to understand things and relationships between things as well as identify the time and space of things. The paper also focuses on trust of the cultural information on the Web. Users make trust judgments based on provenance that may or may not be explicitly offered to them. In particular, we describe how provenance is managed within digital preservation and access processes within VEPIS and define whether this management meets the W3C Provenance Incubator Group’s Requirements for Provenance on the Web. The paper is based on the results of the research initiated in 2018–2019 at the Faculty of Communication and the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics of Vilnius University by authors of this paper.Saityno technologijos sudaro galimybę tenkinti įvairiapusiškas informacines skaitmeninės eros vartotojų reikmes. Kita vertus, iki šiol aktuali problema išlieka atminties institucijų į saityną teikiamo skaitmeninto turinio semantinis integralumas. Informacijos ir duomenų turinio semantinis suderinamumas ypač aktualus integruotoms sistemoms. Straipsnyje apibūdinama ontologijomis grindžiamų metaduomenų koncepcija. Straipsnyje aprašomas CIDOC/CRM ontologijos kaip tarpininkavimo schemos vaidmuo VEPIS sistemoje. Straipsnis taip pat supažindina su Asmenvardžių, vietovardžių ir istorinės chronologijos tezauru (BAVIC), VEPIS atliekančiu pamatinės ontologijos vaidmenį (leidžia suprasti esybes ir jų santykius, jų santykį su laiku ir erdve). Kita straipsnyje analizuojama problema yra susijusi su kultūros informacijos turinio patikimumu saityne. Vartotojai apie informacijos ir duomenų patikimumą sprendžia remdamiesi proveniencija, kuri gali arba negali būti jiems tiesiogiai pateikiama. Straipsnyje analizuojama, kaip proveniencija yra valdoma VEPIS skaitmeninto turinio ilgalaikio išsaugojimo ir jos sklaidos procesų metu, ir kartu nustatoma, ar šie procesai atitinka proveniencijos saityne W3C Provenance Incubator Group reikalavimus. Straipsnyje remiamasi Vilniaus universiteto Komunikacijos fakulteto ir Matematikos fakulteto 2018–2019 m. straipsnio autorių inicijuoto tyrimo rezultatais

Towards Content-Sensitive Access to the Artefacts of the Bulgarian Iconography

his paper presents an ontological model of the knowledge about Bulgarian iconographical artefacts. It also describes content-sensitive services for access, browse, search and group iconographical objects, based on the presented ontology that will be implemented in the multimedia digital library “Virtual encyclopedia of Bulgarian iconography”