Accessing Cultural Heritage Collections using Semantic Web Techniques Antoine ISAAC (inluding cool graphics by Frank van Harmelen) STITCH Project Book & Digital Media Master March 2 nd, 2007

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Background CATCH Continuous Access To Cultural Heritage Funded by NWO 10 computer science research projects applied to the Cultural Heritage field Personalization of access Image and text analysis for creating metadata … STITCH SemanTic Interoperability To access Cultural Heritage Exchanging and integrating metadata

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Agenda Cultural Heritage and Semantic Web Two important issues Publishing Cultural Heritage vocabularies on the Semantic Web Vocabulary alignment Demo

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Some Needs for Cultural Heritage Collections Representation of objects and knowledge about them Pointing at collection objects Describing them (creating metadata) according to specific Metadata structures (schemes) Controlled expert vocabularies (e.g. thesauri) Accessing object using metadata E.g. search using information contained in thesauri

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques KB Illustrated Manuscripts

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques KB Illustrated Manuscripts

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques The Semantic Web (1/4) Pointing at resources: documents, knowledge objects Uniform Resource Identifiers ( ≈ URLs)

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques A Web of Resources Amsterdam rep321#paragraph3 rep321 The_Netherlands

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques The Semantic Web (2/4) Pointing at resources: documents, knowledge objects Creating structured assertions involving resources RDF (Resource Description Framework) Factual knowledge encoded as subject-property-object triples

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Metadata in RDF subject Amsterdam rep321#paragraph3 rep321 partOf The_Netherlands hasCapital subject

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques The Semantic Web (3/4) Pointing at resources: documents, knowledge objects Enabling structured assertions Using “building blocks” with precise semantics Ontologies: formal definitions of shared conceptual vocabularies RDF Schema /OWL (Ontology Web Language)

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Ontological information subject Amsterdam rep321#paragraph3 rep321 Report type partOf The_Netherlands hasCapital subject Document subClassOf

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques The Semantic Web (4/4) Pointing at resources: documents, knowledge objects Enabling structured assertions Using “building blocks” with precise semantics Controlling existing facts, inferring new ones Part of the tasks are delegated from the user to inference engines that use the formal semantics of ontologies

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Ontological information subject Amsterdam rep321#paragraph3 rep321 Report type partOf The_Netherlands hasCapital subject Document subClassOf type

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Building on top of XML eXtensible Markup Language

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Building on top of the Web Web-based resources allow division/sharing of document vocabulary metadata (par3, subject, Amsterdam) different owners & locations

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Cultural Heritage Collections and Semantic Web Need to categorize/classify things Need to structure representations Using MD schemes is similar to using relations Semantic Web techniques are good candidate for representing Cultural Heritage metadata

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Agenda Cultural Heritage and Semantic Web Two important issues Publishing Cultural Heritage vocabularies on the Semantic Web Vocabulary alignment Demo

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Publishing Cultural Heritage vocabularies on the Semantic Web Situation: a lot of knowledge up there Aim: providing domain expertise to the outside world Thesaurus web services Aim: a global network of collection and vocabularies Coordinating different vocabularies Problem: need to enforce some homogenization Many different models and formats

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization Systems World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Model to represent structured vocabularies (thesauri, classification schemes) on the Semantic Web Building blocks to create XML/RDF data Concepts and Concept schemes Lexical properties (prefLabel, altLabel) Semantic relations (broader, related) Notes (scopeNote, definition)

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques SKOS: Nederlandse Basisclassificatie (KB) skos: = nbc: =

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques SKOS: Nederlandse Basisclassificatie (KB) wetenschap en cultuur in het algemeen organisatie van wetenschap en cultuur museologie voor algemene musea, zie: 02.14

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques SKOS: Brinkman Trefwoorden (KB) skos: = bk: =

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques SKOS Open (future) standard Web-compatible Shareable Links and blocks have established meaning Compliant with community needs

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Agenda Cultural Heritage and Semantic Web Two important issues Publishing Cultural Heritage vocabularies on the Semantic Web Vocabulary alignment Demo

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Cultural Heritage Interoperability Problems Current trend: accessing different collections simultaneously Problem: integrating different databases/metadata schemes/vocabularies Syntactic interoperability can be solved Common metadata scheme Common vocabulary model (SKOS?) How about conceptual heterogeneity?

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

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Old situation

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” Doing it automatically Vocabularies are big (tens of thousands concepts) They evolve Application can change their reference vocabularies Using techniques from Linguistics Computer science Statistics

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques New situation

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 brainLongtumor Long

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Lexical alignment Compare each pair of concepts Use labels and synonyms of concepts Heuristic method to discover equivalence and specialization relations tumor brainLongtumor Long More specific than

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Lexical alignment: Manuscripts case broaderEquivalent

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 brainLongtumor Long

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Statistical alignment

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Statistic approach: KB case Experiment with GOO trefwoordenthesaurus and Brinkman thesaurus

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Statistic approach: KB case Comparing books indexed with BK concepts and books indexed with GTT concepts Overlap measure

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Results 1: ( ) Schilderijen - schilderkunst 2: ( ) Kwaliteitszorg - kwaliteitsmanagement 3: ( ) Personeelsmanagement - personeelsbeleid 4: ( ) Beeldende kunsten - beeldende kunst 5: ( ) Nederlands - Nederlandse taalkunde 17: ( ) Diabetes mellitus - suikerziekte

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Agenda Cultural Heritage and Semantic Web Two important issues Publishing Cultural Heritage vocabularies on the Semantic Web Vocabulary alignment Demo

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Demo KB Illuminated Manuscripts BNF Mandragore Manuscripts

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

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

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Manuscripts vocabularies Mandragore Big (16000 terms) Weakly structured (2-level deep, multi-inheritance) Alternative lexical forms Definitions IconClass Huge (>24000 subjects) Richly structured : 10 level hierarchy, cross-references Compound concepts: keys, structural digits… Keywords [Monolingual case, since Iconclass comes in French and English]

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Demo mandraNewNONE, amphibianshttp://stitch.cs.vu.nl/rp33333/MANDRA-SV-ICE- mandraNewNONE Wheat

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Conclusion: Semantic Web can help Cultural Heritage Representation of collections and associated expert vocabularies Publication and access Semantic integration New opportunities for making knowledge accessible Cf. Dublin core RDF Schema

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Links Semantic Web at W3C Semantic Web at Vrije Universiteit SKOS Other Cultural Heritage and Semantic Web projects MuseumFinland, eCulture,

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques Thanks!

Accessing Cultural Heritage collections using Semantic Web techniques