1. Notes on ThoughtLab / Athena WP4 November 13, 2009 Antoine Isaac aisaac@few.vu.nl

2. 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

3. Goal: semantics in Europeana v1.0 Building a semantic layer to help accessing content Stefan Gradmann, EDL D2.5

4. Europeana Thought Lab http://europeana.eu/portal/thought-lab.html

5. Semantic autocompletion

6. Clustering of results

7. Baseline: matching concepts' label

8. A "more specific Egypte"??

9. A "more specific Egypt"?

10. A concept more specific than the Egypt one

11. Following other relations

12. Following other relations - creator

13. Following other relations - match

14. Following other relations – death place

16. 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

17. Where are the challenges? Semantic conversion of data –Using appropriate data models –Enriching legacy metadata Semantic alignments –Between description ontologies vra:depicts rdfs:subPropertyOf dc:subject –Between concepts in controlled vocabularies iconclass:bird skos:closeMatch ddc:bird

18. Alignment of semantic references

19. Where are the challenges? Semantic alignment (c'ed) –Find correspondences between large vocabularies –In a multilingual context

20. 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

21. What kind of semantic alignment? Fundamental goal: –enhancing semantic interoperability of collections –via the KOSs used for describing them Several options…

22. Structural models for interoperability (British Standard BS8723) 1.Unified structure: one KOS 2.Pairwise relations 3.Backbone structure Voc A Voc B Voc C Voc D Voc B Voc C Voc D Voc A

23. 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

25. At some point, we have to deal with what is there Especially if it's much better than nothing!

26. Goals of Athena WG4? Athena Integrated Thesaurus or Athena Thesaurus Network? Voc A Voc B Voc C Voc D Athena Thesaurus Voc C Voc D Voc A

27. 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

28. 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

29. 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?

30. Thanks!