Ontology-Based Data Access and Integration

An ontology-based data integration (OBDI) system is an information management system consisting of three components: an ontology, a set of data sources, and the mapping between the two. The ontology is a conceptual, formal description of the domain of interest to a given organization (or a community of users), expressed in terms of relevant concepts, attributes of concepts, relationships between concepts, and logical assertions characterizing the domain knowledge. The data sources are the repositories accessible by the organization where data concerning the domain are stored. In the general case, such repositories are numerous, heterogeneous, each one managed and maintained independently from the others. The mapping is a precise specification of the correspondence between the data contained in the data sources and the elements of the ontology. The main purpose of an OBDI system is to allow information consumers to query the data using the elements in the ontology as predicates. In the special case where the organization manages a single data source, the term ontology-based data access (ODBA) system is used

Enriching and publishing cultural heritage as linked open data

The last decade a lot of effort has been put from the cultural community around the world on digitization and aggregation activities. The main outcome of these was the development of portals like European, DPLA, DigitalNZ that are collecting and sharing to the public digitized cultural assets from Europe, America, New Zealand and Australia respectively. Their main objective however is not only to bring public closer to culture but also to efficiently represent information about cultural objects that will make them useful to various target groups like teachers, students, developers by also permitting their creative re-use. The best practice for fulfilling this requirement is their publication according to the Linked Open Data principles. In this paper we present the tools developed and the methodology adopted through the participation of our group in ag-gregation activities for enriching and publishing cultural heritage as Linked Open Data