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Accessing Cultural Heritage Collections using Semantic Web Techniques

Accessing Cultural Heritage Collections using Semantic Web Techniques. Antoine ISAAC STITCH Project SIKS Semantic Web Seminar, Utrecht April 11 th , 2007. Background. CATCH@ NWO C ontinuous A ccess T o C ultural H eritage 10 computer science projects applied to the CH field

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Accessing Cultural Heritage Collections using Semantic Web Techniques

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  1. Accessing Cultural Heritage Collections using Semantic Web Techniques Antoine ISAAC STITCH Project SIKS Semantic Web Seminar, Utrecht April 11th, 2007

  2. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Background • CATCH@ NWO • Continuous Access To Cultural Heritage • 10 computer science projects applied to the CH field • Personalization of access, image/text/audio analysis • Integration of projects in CH institutes (museums, archives) • STITCH • SemanTic Interoperability To access Cultural Heritage • Exchanging and integrating metadata • Vrije Universiteit, Koninklijke Bibliotheek & Max Planck Institute

  3. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Agenda • Cultural Heritage and Semantic Web • Two important issues • Representing Cultural Heritage vocabularies on the Semantic Web • Vocabulary alignment • Demo

  4. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Some Needs for CH Collections • Representation of objects and knowledge about them • Pointing at collection artifacts: books… • Describing them: creating metadata • Specific metadata structures (metadata schemes) • Controlled expert vocabularies (e.g. thesauri) • Accessing artifacts using metadata • E.g. search using information contained in thesauri

  5. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques KB Illustrated Manuscripts – Iconclass vocabulary

  6. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques KB Illustrated Manuscripts

  7. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Some Needs for CH Collections (2) • Communicating data to the outside world • Web portals • Integrating different collections • Virtual collections • The European Library, http://www.theeuropeanlibrary.org • Geheugen van Nederland, http://www.geheugenvannederland.nl

  8. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques (Biased) Semantic Web • Pointing at resources: documents, knowledge objects • Enabling structured assertions • Metadata about entities present on the Web • Using vocabularies with defined semantics Ontologies: formal definitions of shared conceptual vocabularies RDF Schema /OWL <owl:Class rdf:about="#Bird"> <owl:disjointWith> <owl:Class rdf:about="#Mammals"/> </owl:disjointWith> <rdfs:subClassOf> <owl:Class rdf:ID="Animals"/> </rdfs:subClassOf> </owl:Class> <Bird rdf:about="#tweety"/>

  9. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques (Biased) Semantic Web • Web-based resources allow division/sharing of • document • vocabulary • metadata http://www.geo.org/voc/ (doc3, hasSubject, Amsterdam) http://www.kb.nl/eDepot http://www.ned.nl/doc3 different owners & locations

  10. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Cultural Heritage Collections and Semantic Web • Categorizing/classifying things • Structuring descriptions • Web-based approach Semantic Web techniques are good candidates for representing and exploiting Cultural Heritage metadata

  11. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Important line of research • Long-term projects • MuseumFinland, http://www.museosuomi.fi/ • eCulture, http://e-culture.multimedian.nl/ • Common portals to (many) collections • Exploiting the data found in the original systems • Metadata content: place, date, creator… • Semantics of vocabularies used to create this information • E.g. hierarchical information • “A Picture featuring a crow features a bird”

  12. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques

  13. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Agenda • Cultural Heritage and Semantic Web • Two important issues • Representing Cultural Heritage vocabularies on the Semantic Web • Vocabulary alignment • Demo

  14. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Representing CH vocabularies on the Semantic Web - Similarities • Both ontologies and thesauri bring concept hierarchies • giving the intended meaning of a vocabulary through links between its items • “concept/term” ≈?owl:Class • “broader” ≈?rdfs:subClassOf • “scope notes” ≈?rdfs:comment

  15. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Representing CH vocabularies on the Semantic Web - Problems • Thesauri designed for humans, no formal interpretation • How to interpret a thesaurus in RDFS/OWL: • If “(Story of) Hercules” is a class, what are its instances? • Is “Hercules shooting Nessus” a subclass of “Love-affairs of Hercules”? Thesaurus hierarchy: subsumption, mereological relation,…

  16. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Representing CH vocabularies on the Semantic Web – Different approaches • Ontologising • Cleaning thesaurus by distinguishing roles, kinds, etc. • Cleaning the hierarchical links • Representing knowledge found in sources as such • Informal knowledge represented in RDF/OWL formal framework

  17. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques SKOS • Simple Knowledge Organization Systems • (Future) W3C standard • Model to represent controlled and structured vocabularies on the Semantic Web • Compatible with community needs • Core model for representing thesauri, classification schemes, etc.

  18. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques SKOS • Building blocks (ontology) to create XML/RDF data about controlled vocabularies • Classes Concept and ConceptScheme • Lexical properties • prefLabel • altLabel • Semantic properties • broader, narrower • related • Properties for notes and comments • scopeNote • definition

  19. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques SKOS: Brinkman Trefwoorden (KB) 075607204 geneeskunde RT geneesmiddelen NT kindergeneeskunde 075607220 geneesmiddelen UF medicijnen 075611791 kindergeneeskunde BT geneeskunde noot: kinderen ouder dan 12 vallen niet onder kindergeneeskunde medicijnen USE geneesmiddelen

  20. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques SKOS: Brinkman Trefwoorden (KB) skos: = http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/core#bk: = http://www.kb.nl/brinkman/

  21. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques SKOS: Brinkman Trefwoorden (KB) <skos:Concept rdf:about="http://www.kb.nl/brinkman/bk075607204"> <skos:prefLabel>geneeskunde</skos:prefLabel> <skos:related rdf:resource="http://www.kb.nl/brinkman/bk075607220"/> </skos:Concept> <skos:Concept rdf:about="http://www.kb.nl/brinkman/bk075607220"> <rdf:type rdf:resource="&skos;Concept"/> <skos:prefLabel>geneesmiddelen</skos:prefLabel> <skos:altLabel>medicijnen</skos:altLabel> </skos:Concept> <skos:Concept rdf:about="http://www.kb.nl/brinkman/bk075611791"> <rdf:type rdf:resource="&skos;Concept"/> <skos:prefLabel>kindergeneeskunde</skos:prefLabel> <skos:broader rdf:resource="http://www.kb.nl/brinkman/bk075607204"/> <skos:scopeNote>kinderen ouder dan 12 vallen niet onder kindergeneeskunde</skos:scopeNote> </skos:Concept>

  22. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Agenda • Cultural Heritage and Semantic Web • Two important issues • Representing Cultural Heritage vocabularies on the Semantic Web • Vocabulary alignment • Demo

  23. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Cultural Heritage Interoperability Problems • Problem: integrating different databases/metadata schemes/vocabularies • Syntactic interoperability can be solved • Common format: XML (RDF) • Common vocabulary model (SKOS) • How about conceptual heterogeneity?

  24. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques The semantic interoperability problem • There is no standard thesaurus • We don’t really want it different vocabularies for different expertise domains, traditions, tasks • Consequence: • “klassieke ruïnes” vs. “landschap met ruïnes” • “maagd Maria” vs. “Heilige Moeder” • Practical problem: • Searching for “Heilige Moeder” misses “maagd Maria” • Unless we know both vocabularies

  25. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Old situation

  26. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Vocabulary alignment • STITCH aim: find correspondences between vocabulary elements • “klassieke ruïnes” ≈ “landschap met ruïnes” • “maagd Maria” = “Heilige Moeder”

  27. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques New situation

  28. Long brain tumor Long tumor Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Automatic alignment techniques • Lexical Labels of entities and textual definitions • Structural Structure of the formal definitions of entities, position in the hierarchy • Statistical Object information (e.g. book indexing) • Background knowledge Using a shared conceptual reference to find links

  29. More specific than Funeral of Patroclus Patroclus Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Lexical alignment • Use preferred labels, synonyms, notes • Heuristic methods to discover equivalence and specialization relations

  30. Long brain tumor Long tumor Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Automatic Alignment Techniques • Lexical Labels of entities and textual definitions • Structural Structure of the formal definitions of entities, position in the hierarchy • Statistical Object information (e.g. book indexing) • Shared background knowledge Using a conceptual reference to deduce correspondences

  31. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Statistical alignment

  32. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Statistic approach: Koninklijke Bibliotheek case • Situation: 2 overlapping collections indexed with different thesauri • Comparison means: measuring overlap between concepts from the thesauri • Using the sets of books indexed by these concepts • Results 1: 9132.9 Schilderijen - schilderkunst 2: 8088.5 Kwaliteitszorg - kwaliteitsmanagement 3: 6232.7 Personeelsmanagement - personeelsbeleid ... 17: 3421.8 Diabetes mellitus - suikerziekte

  33. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Agenda • Cultural Heritage and Semantic Web • Two important issues • Representing Cultural Heritage vocabularies on the Semantic Web • Vocabulary alignment • Demo

  34. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Demo • KB Illuminated Manuscripts • French National Library Mandragore Manuscripts

  35. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Manuscripts, 2nd Collection: BNF Mandragore

  36. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Manuscripts, 2nd Collection: BNF Mandragore

  37. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Demo • http://stitch.cs.vu.nl/rp33333/MANDRA-SV-ICE-mandraNewNONE , amphibians • http://stitch.cs.vu.nl/rp33333/MANDRA-SV-MANDRA-mandraNewNONE, wheat

  38. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Conclusion: Semantic Web can help Cultural Heritage • Representation of collections and associated expert vocabularies • Semantic integration through correspondences between different vocabularies New opportunities for exploiting cultural heritage information

  39. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Thanks!

  40. Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Links • Semantic Web at Vrije Universiteit • http://www.cs.vu.nl/ai/kr/ • http://www.cs.vu.nl/bi/ • SKOS • http://www.w3.org/2004/02/skos/ • Other Cultural Heritage and Semantic Web projects • MuseumFinland, http://www.museosuomi.fi/ • eCulture, http://e-culture.multimedian.nl/

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