A Systemic Approach for Effective Semantic Access to Cultural Content Ilianna Kollia, Vassilis Tzouvaras, Nasos Drosopoulos and George Stamou Presenter: Shima Dastgheib

Digital Cultural Heritage  Digital evolution of the Cultural Heritage Field has grown rapidly in the last few years  Books, photographs, audio-visual material, etc

a single point of access to European Cultural Heritage

semantic interoperability What? The common automatic interpretation of the meaning of the exchanged information Why? Diversity of content types and of metadata schemas used to annotate the content

Steps towards “common understanding”  a representation language that exchanges the formal semantics of the information: RDF,OWL,SKOS  reasoning tools, ontology querying engines

mapping to a common data model at the Europeana level:  European Semantic Element (ESE) : Dublin Core-based  European Data Model(EDM): enable the linking of data and to connect and enrich descriptions in accordance with the Semantic Web developments

Proposed System  To improve user experience, more detailed semantic description of content is needed.  Semantic query answering : answer queries based not only on string matching but also on implicit meaning  Reasoning based on domain terminological knowledge  Content metadata is terminologically described and semantically connected with other information  The key is to semantically connect metadata with ontological domain knowledge via appropriate mapping

System Architecture

EDM re-uses from the following namespaces  RDF and RDFS  The OAI Object Reuse and Exchange (ORE)  SKOS  The Dublin Core namespaces

Metadata Aggregation and Semantic Enrichment Workflow Normalized Values Metadata transformatio n Ingested metadata Aggregate d metadata Semantic repositor y Harvesting, Delivery Schema Mapping Value Mapping Revision, Annotation Semantic Enrichment

Query Answering  SPARQL (the W3C query language for RDF)  The answers are tuples of individuals stored in the semantic repository, satisfying the constraints expressed in the body of the query

Evaluation  Metadata aggregation  Questionnaires, interviews  Query Answering:  Computational cost is affordable with small size knowledge base, but excessive when dealing with large scale data

Conclusion  All over the world, cultural institutions have been digitizing their collections of books, manuscripts, videos, etc  Different metadata schemas are used to annotate the digitized material  Europeana, provides access to the distributed content through collection of contributing metadata schemas.  semantic interoperability has a key role  Scalability should be improved