300 likes | 375 Views
Notes on ThoughtLab / Athena WP4. November 13, 2009 Antoine Isaac aisaac@few.vu.nl. Towards semantics-enabled search. Enhance access to Europeana content by semantics Exploiting different types of relations locatedIn, isBornIn, created… Making use of inference
E N D
Notes on ThoughtLab / Athena WP4 November 13, 2009 Antoine Isaac aisaac@few.vu.nl
Towards semantics-enabled search • Enhance access to Europeana content by semantics • Exploiting different types of relations • locatedIn, isBornIn, created… • Making use of inference • Finding work showing London for a query on UK • Rich descriptions are already there, in metadata! • Requires to make it properly machine-accessible
Goal: semantics in Europeana v1.0 Building a semantic layer to help accessing content Stefan Gradmann, EDL D2.5
Europeana Thought Lab • http://europeana.eu/portal/thought-lab.html
Enabling Technologies • RDF • Uniform format for data • Amenable to sharing and linking • OWL • Representation of metadata structures • Amenable to inference • SKOS • Representation of controlled vocabulary • Allows exploitation of legacy knowledge organization • Simple but precious! • E.g., hierarchical relationships for cluster creation
Where are the challenges? • Semantic conversion of data • Using appropriate data models • Enriching legacy metadata • Semantic alignments • Between description ontologies vra:depictsrdfs:subPropertyOfdc:subject • Between concepts in controlled vocabularies iconclass:bird skos:closeMatch ddc:bird
Where are the challenges? • Semantic alignment (c'ed) • Find correspondences between large vocabularies • In a multilingual context
Athena WP4 Seems to fit very nicely into that challenge • SKOS & SKOSification • Semantic alignment: From Marie-Véronique & Johann, Lund "The Athena Thesaurus = network of Athena-compliant micro-thesauri with bridges in-between" • Focus on multilingual resources
What kind of semantic alignment? • Fundamental goal: • enhancing semantic interoperability of collections • via the KOSs used for describing them • Several options…
Voc A Voc B Voc C Voc D Voc A Voc B Voc C Voc D Structural models for interoperability(British Standard BS8723) • Unified structure: one KOS • Pairwise relations • Backbone structure
Structural models for interoperability ThoughtLab "data cloud" • Not really corresponding to best practice • More like a "web of data" cloud • But still, a couple of backbone/central nodes • Again, like a "web of data" cloud
At some point, we have to deal with what is there • Especially if it's much better than nothing!
Voc A Athena Thesaurus Voc C Voc D Voc A Voc B Voc C Voc D Goals of Athena WG4? • Athena Integrated Thesaurus • or Athena Thesaurus Network?
Throwing away integrated thesaurus? • Individual manual mappings can already be exploited • Dumping them in the semantic layer will bring interesting stuff • Keeping original vocabularies as access points can be an asset • But a backbone for museum KOSs is likely to bring more • Especially as an umbrella for all those small controlled lists! • An unified multilingual thesaurus is always extremely precious to have
Throwing away integrated thesaurus? Thesaurus integration can be used as a driving scenario • Issue: mapping without application in mind is tricky • What's the "meaning" of a concept? • archeology; netherlands can perfectly be mapped to excavations for translation of book annotations at KB • Thesaurus integration can provide with mapping criteria • Two concepts are equivalent if we can fit them in the same place of a semantic network
Wishlist? • Again, do not forget that intermediate results (individual mappings) can be very precious • If you produce them as part of the process anyway, there should be a way to export them • As SKOS? • Problem: ideally, this would require SKOS versions of the individual "micro-thesauri" • Is that planned?