Enhancing Accessibility to Heterogeneous Sri Lankan Cultural Heritage Information across Museums through Metadata Aggregation

Thesis (Master of Science in Library and Information Studies)--University of Tsukuba, no. 36035, 2016.8.3

WW1LOD: an application of CIDOC-CRM to World War 1 linked data

The CIDOC-CRM standard indicates that common events, actors, places and timeframes are important in linking together cultural material, and provides a framework for describing them. However, merely describing entities in this way in two datasets does not yet interlink them. To do that, the identities of instances still need to be either reconciled, or be based on a shared vocabulary. The WW1LOD dataset presented in this paper was created to facilitate both of these approaches for collections dealing with the First World War. For this purpose, the dataset includes events, places, agents, times, keywords, and themes related to the war, based on over ten different authoritative data sources from providers such as the Imperial War Museum. The content is harmonized into RDF, and published as a Linked Open Data service. While generally basing on CIDOC-CRM, some modeling choices used also deviate from it where our experience dictated such. In the article, these deviations are discussed in the hope that they may serve as examples where CIDOC-CRM itself may warrant further examination. As a demonstration of use, the dataset and online service have been used to create a contextual reader application that is able link together and pull in information related to WW1 from e.g. 1914–1918 Online, Wikipedia, WW1 Discovery, Europeana and the Digital Public Library of America

Semantic enrichment for enhancing LAM data and supporting digital humanities. Review article

With the rapid development of the digital humanities (DH) field, demands for historical and cultural heritage data have generated deep interest in the data provided by libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs). In order to enhance LAM data’s quality and discoverability while enabling a self-sustaining ecosystem, “semantic enrichment” becomes a strategy increasingly used by LAMs during recent years. This article introduces a number of semantic enrichment methods and efforts that can be applied to LAM data at various levels, aiming to support deeper and wider exploration and use of LAM data in DH research. The real cases, research projects, experiments, and pilot studies shared in this article demonstrate endless potential for LAM data, whether they are structured, semi-structured, or unstructured, regardless of what types of original artifacts carry the data. Following their roadmaps would encourage more effective initiatives and strengthen this effort to maximize LAM data’s discoverability, use- and reuse-ability, and their value in the mainstream of DH and Semantic Web

Semantic enrichment for enhancing LAM data and supporting digital humanities. Review article

With the rapid development of the digital humanities (DH) field, demands for historical and cultural heritage data have generated deep interest the data provided by libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs). In order to enhance LAM data’s quality and discoverability while enabling a self-sustaining ecosystem, “semantic enrichment” becomes a strategy increasingly used by LAMs during recent years. This article introduces a number of semantic enrichment methods and efforts that can be applied to LAM data at various levels, aiming to support deeper and wider exploration and use of LAM data in DH research. The real cases, research projects, experiments, and pilot studies shared in this article demonstrate endless potential for LAM data, whether they are structured, semi-structured, or unstructured, regardless of what types of original artifacts carry the data. Following their roadmaps would encourage more effective initiatives and strengthen this effort to maximize LAM data’s discoverability, use- and reuse-ability, and their value in the mainstream of DH and Semantic Web

Europeana Creative. EDM Endpoint. Custom Views

The paper discusses the Europeana Creative project which aims to facilitate re-use of cultural heritage metadata and content by the creative industries. The paper focuses on the contribution of Ontotext to the project activities. The Europeana Data Model (EDM) is further discussed as a new proposal for structuring the data that Europeana will ingest, manage and publish. The advantages of using EDM instead of the current ESE metadata set are highlighted. Finally, Ontotext’s EDM Endpoint is presented, based on OWLIM semantic repository and SPARQL query language. A user-friendly RDF view is presented in order to illustrate the possibilities of Forest - an extensible modular user interface framework for creating linked data and semantic web applications

Linked Data for the Humanities: methods and techniques

So far, the impact of Linked Data in the Library and Cultural Heritage domain has been significant and testified by large scale efforts such as the one of Europeana. However, at a closer look, the impact of Semantic Web research on the Humanities has been discontinuous. Foundational techniques and methods developed by the SW community are still perceived as esoteric by many DH practitioners. In addition, more recent approaches have not been disseminated yet in the DH community. we propose a half-day tutorial on LD methods and techniques, to present the theoretical and technical foundations of Linked Data, to provide a reference collection of reusable tools to boost an effective adoption of LD in DH projects, and to showcase a set of innovative methods for extracting and linking data from texts

Archives and AI: An Overview of Current Debates and Future Perspectives

The digital transformation is turning archives, both old and new, into data. As a consequence, automation in the form of artificial intelligence techniques is increasingly applied both to scale traditional recordkeeping activities, and to experiment with novel ways to capture, organise, and access records. We survey recent developments at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and archival thinking and practice. Our overview of this growing body of literature is organised through the lenses of the Records Continuum model. We find four broad themes in the literature on archives and artificial intelligence: theoretical and professional considerations, the automation of recordkeeping processes, organising and accessing archives, and novel forms of digital archives. We conclude by underlining emerging trends and directions for future work, which include the application of recordkeeping principles to the very data and processes that power modern artificial intelligence and a more structural - yet critically aware - integration of artificial intelligence into archival systems and practice