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

Documenting Collections of Bulgarian Museums. Framing a CIDOC-based Ontological Presentation

Report published in the Proceedings of the National Conference on "Education and Research in the Information Society", Plovdiv, May, 2014The paper offers short analytic survey and comparison between the standard for description of cultural objects, CIDOC-CRM (ISO 21127:2006) and museum passports, inventory books and files, all of which are used in documenting museum artifacts in Bulgaria since 50-s. Three different field-sets have been explored. The fields in use are more than 100. Several case studies and good practices which use CIDOC-CRM, CRMdig, SPECTRUM, LIDO and EDM are shown. The result from their comparison with Bulgarian practices is presented in a table, where 25 fields, taken from Bulgarian passports are listed with respect to three factors: (1) metadata type they are representing, (structural, administrative or descriptive), (2) their corresponding category/class as found in (2) CIDOC-CRM and in (3) EDM. The author is using this correspondence frame for creating a CIDOC-CRM-based referent ontology for description of Bulgarian museum artefacts. A detailed model, based on this frame will be created, with terminology thesaurus attached.Association for the Development of the Information Society, Institute of Mathematics and Informatics Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Plovdiv University "Paisii Hilendarski

DDB-KG: The German Bibliographic Heritage in a Knowledge Graph

Under the German government’s initiative “NEUSTART Kultur”, the German Digital Library or Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (DDB) is undergoing improvements to enhance user-experience. As an initial step, emphasis is placed on creating a knowledge graph from the bibliographic record collection of the DDB. This paper discusses the challenges facing the DDB in terms of retrieval and the solutions in addressing them. In particular, limitations of the current data model or ontology to represent bibliographic metadata is analyzed through concrete examples. This study presents the complete ontological mapping from DDB-Europeana Data Model (DDB-EDM) to FaBiO, and a prototype of the DDB-KG made available as a SPARQL endpoint. The suitabiliy of the target ontology is demonstrated with SPARQL queries formulated from competency question

A Web-Oriented Multi-layer Model to Interact with Theatrical Performances

This paper presents an innovative approach to online fruition of theater performances. Web applications like traditional viewers are already available for the wide audience of Internet users. Our proposal aims at adding both interactivity and multi-layer fruition, and a way to manipulate and create new media. The premise to reach these goals is digitizing a number of heterogeneous materials in order to describe a single performance comprehensively, e.g. different video and audio-takes from different perspectives, and a number of related materials such as scripts, fashion plates, playbills, etc. The format we adopt to encode such information is based on the XML international standard known as IEEE 1599. Finally, an advanced Web player supporting search and play functions for synchronized materials must be designed. This work describes the whole process, from the acquisition of materials directly on the stage to their publishing on a Web portal

Formal Description and Automatic Generation of Learning Spaces Based on Ontologies

AbstractA good virtual Learning Space (LS) should convey pertinent learning information to the visitors at the most adequate time and locations to favor their knowledge acquisition.Considering the consolidation of the internet and the improvement of the interaction, searching, and learning mechanisms, we propose a generic architecture, called CaVa, to create virtual Learning Spaces building up on cultural institution documents. More precisely, our proposal is to automatically create ontology-based virtual learning environments.Thus, to impart relevant learning materials to the virtual LS, we propose the use of ontologies to represent the key concepts and semantic relations in an user- and machine-understandable format. These concepts together with the data (extracted from the real documents) stored in a digital storage format (XML datasets, relational databases, etc.) are displayed in an ontology-based learning space that enables the visitors to use the available features and tools to learn about a specific domain.According to the approach here discussed, each desired virtual LS must be specified rigorously through a domain specific language (DSL) that was designed and implemented.To validate the proposed architecture, three case studies will be used as instances of CaVa architecture