1. SEMANTIC WEB AND CULTURAL
HERITAGE

2. WHAT IS THE SEMANTIC WEB?
 The Semantic Web is a web of methods and
technologies that allow machines to read and
understand the meaning of information on the
internet
 SEMANTICS= MEANING
 Intended as a real Web, where data is connected
through meaning, in accessible ways in a limited
location
 Conceived by Tim Berners-Lee as a continuation
of the the current Internet.
 Monitored and promoted by the W3 consortium

3. WHAT IS THE SEMANTIC WEB?
 The Semantic Web will organize information in
conceptual spaces according to its meaning; the
current web suffers in searching information
(with keyword-based searching), extracting
relevant data across documents and outdated
information.
 Semantic Web seeks to have an automated
design to support maintenance.
 In order for it to work, there needs to be
integration, standardization, and adaptation by
the users.

4. RDF – RESOURCE DESCRIPTION
FRAMEWORK
 RDF allows for a common framework where data
from various sources can merge. It takes two
URIs and shows the relationship between them.
 Showing relationships is key: For example, in a
regular search if you enter the keyword "Harry
Potter" it has no way of knowing whether "Harry
Potter" is the creator, character, related term etc.
in relation to the results.
 Using RDF, the relations are coded in the results
giving them meaning.
 It is based on the concept of triples- subject,
predicate, object

5. RDF
Here are the Triples:
Harry Potter <hasPet> Hedwig
Harry Potter <hasEmail> harrypotter@hogwarts.net

6. SIMPLE KNOWLEDGE
ORGANIZATION SYSTEM (SKOS)
 SKOS is a standard set of languages and
elements that are used as framework for
thesauri, taxonomies, folksonomies, and subject-
heading systems.
 Built upon RDF and RDFS
 Can be used with OWL
 Aims to be a more simple and intuitive set of
standards
 Maintained by World Wide Web Consortium
(WSC)

7. SKOS ELEMENTS
 Main element is Concept
 Units of thought - Objects, ideas, meanings, and
events
 Labels
 Preferred Lexical Labels
 Alternative Lexical Labels
 Hidden Lexical Labels
 Semantic Relationships
 Broader/Narrower Relationships
 Associative Relationships
 Documentary Notes

8. SKOS EXAMPLE (RDF TURTLE)
ex:birds rdf:type skos:Concept;
skos:prefLabel "birds"@en;
skos:preflabel “aves”@sp;
skos:altLabel "animals"@en;
skos:hiddenLabel "burds"@en;
skos:broader “creatures”@en
skos:narrower “winged”@en
skos:related “ornithology”@en
skos:examples “robin, sparrow, chicken”@en
skos:editorial note “edited on 4/2/10”@en

9. SKOS EXAMPLE

10. SKOS ONTOLOGY EXAMPLE

11. WEB ONTOLOGY LANGUAGE: OWL
 Semantic web requires more
expressiveness than what RDF can offer;
OWL is a richer vocabulary description
language.
 Allows for greater machine
interoperability of information on the
web.
 OWL is being positioned to be the
standardized language for the Semantic
Web, as identified by W3C.
 Web Ontology Language is used to
process the content of information instead
of just presenting it on a web page.

12. WEB ONTOLOGY LANGUAGE: OWL
 OWL describes the meaning of terminology used
in a document; it adds onto the vocabulary
existing in the RDF Schema (which describes
properties and classes of RDF resources).
 For example, RDF cannot describe relations
between classes or cardinality constraints like
OWL (like Hogwarts students have at most, one
pet) can.
 OWL needs to have a well-defined syntax,
expressive power, and efficient reasoning
capabilities.

13. OWL
Description of the
class of student
wizards
Horrocks, I. (2008). Ontologies and the semantic web. Communications of the ACM. vol.51,
no.12 p.58-67. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier

14. ONTOLOGY
 An ontology like OWL gives a shared
understanding of a domain, which is needed in
overcoming differences in terminologies.
 It will improve accuracy of searches and
interpret retrieved information from a search.
 The development of Semantic Web would be
gradual; in addition, there must be compatibility
between agents that use OWL and those that use
RDF (at least partly): information that is written
at a higher level (OWL) must be interpreted by
agents that can also recognize RDF-written
information.

15. A NOTE ON METADATA
 Cultural heritage collections are indexed with
metadata obtained from thesauri like Iconclass and
Getty’s Vocabularies (Art and Architecture
Thesaurus, Union List of Artist Names, Thesaurus of
Geographic Names, and Cultural Objects Name
Authority). Additionally, SKOS helps to enable
production of controlled vocabularies for the semantic
web.
 These vocabularies are not unified (although overlap
does exist), so browsing many collections in an
interoperable way becomes difficult.
 Metadata and vocabularies must be depicted in RDF
and/or OWL.
 Forming semantic links between different resources is
ontology mapping.

16. USE OF THESAURI/VOCABULARIES
 Many of these collections and projects use the same
thesauri – Getty Vocabularies and Iconclass. Give
authoritative information and strengthen access to
databases.
 Getty Vocabularies consist of the Art and Architecture
Thesaurus (AAT), Thesaurus of Geographic Names
(TGN), The Cultural Objects Name Authority (CONA),
and The Union List of Artist Names (ULAN). These give
structured vocabulary for names, descriptions, titles
biographies, and various information on art, architecture,
important places, works of art and artists, respectively.
 Iconclass describes and classifies information on subjects
(icons) that are depicted in works of art. A hierarchically
ordered collection/classification system.

17. CULTURAL HERITAGE
 Cultural heritage is the legacy of culture
inherited from previous generations of a
particular group or society
 Tangible
 Artifacts, monuments, graves, and buildings.
 Intangible
 Language, rituals, traditions, stories, and oral
histories.

18. BENEFITS
 Preservation
 Access
 Further exploration
 Ability to create relationships within and across
collections
 Patrons can conduct meaningful searches
 Possible to build collections containing items from
different institutions

19. BENEFITS
 How exactly does the Semantic Web create a
“meaningful” search? For example, semantic
links can be created that allow the user to:
 Find a painting of an historic event, find information
on that event along with other artwork depicting it,
locate it on a map and see where nearby events
occurred and how they are represented in artwork.
 Look up at artist, see where this artist lived and
worked, and see works by other artists that lived
nearby at the time, or apprentices of that artist.
 Find additional written reports on events, historical
figures or iconography shown in a cultural heritage
collection.

21. EUROPEANA
 A collection of paintings, music, films and books
from some of Europe’s leading galleries,
museums, libraries and archives. Over 14 million
items currently.
 The Louvre, British Library, and Rijksmuseum
are predominately featured, along with around
1500 smaller institutions.
 Europeana’s goal is to make Europe’s cultural
heritage accessible to the public.

22. EUROPEANA
 Data is linked together for semantic searching.
 Currently, the semantic search is a research prototype.

23. EUROPEANA

24. EUROPEANA – THE CURRENT CATALOG

25. CULTURESAMPO
HTTP://WWW.KULTTUURISAMPO.FI/
 20 Finnish museums, libraries, archives and
other memory organizations, as well as data
imported from websites with 18 different original
schemas.

26. CULTURESAMPO- CONT.
Features Summary o Various Entry
Points
 Map Search (historic o Autocompletion
and current)
 Faceted results o Visualizations
 Timeline o Cross language
 Person relations searches
 Semantic Wikipedia o Timeline
 Biographies

27. STITCH @ CATCH
SEMANTIC INTEROPERABILITY
TO ACCESS CULTURAL
HERITAGE
 Develop theories, tools and methods
needed for metadata interoperability.
 Trying to develop methods to find semantic links
for the purpose of access to various repositories
that are indexed with diverse vocabularies (like
AAT and Iconclass).
 Collaborating with:
 The French National Library: Uses SKOS and linked
data to give access to the collection’s subject
vocabulary.
 Rijksmuseum: Integrating access to the Masterpieces
Collection.

28. MULTIMEDIAN N9C E-CULTURE
PROJECT
 The objective of this project is to give multimedia
access to cultural heritage collections.
 E-culture “demonstrators” will be developed to
give semantic information access and multimedia
visualization between collections in the
Netherlands. A cultural search engine will be
produced.
 Uses Getty’s Thesauri, Rijksmuseum
concepts/locations/people and SCVN (Dutch
ethnology) and searches across Rijksmuseum,
Archive.com, Museum Volkenkunde, and
Tropenmuseum.

29. MULTIMEDIAN N9C
E-CULTURE
PROJECT
Features include a map
for geographic
visualization for works
and charts. Both are in
the nascent stages of
development.

30. CHIP (CULTURAL HERITAGE
INFORMATION PRESENTATION)
 Funded by the Dutch Science Foundation.
Collaboration with Rijksmuseum. The project is
determining how semantic web can be used to
build Rijksmuseum’s vocabulary. Another goal is
to provide semantic recommendations and better
browsing and searching.
 Uses Getty Vocabularies and Iconclass.

31. CHIP (CULTURAL HERITAGE
INFORMATION PRESENTATION)
 3 tools have been developed within the semantic
web model
 Artwork Recommender: Semantically-powered tool,
rates artwork for a user’s profile
 Tour Wizard: Personal virtual tour for the user.
 Mobile Tour: Mapping a virtual tour within the
physical space of the museum. Guide users through
collections via mobile devices.
 Create a user profile, can label topics you do not
like or like, view information on artists and
artworks.

32. CHIP (CULTURAL HERITAGE
INFORMATION PRESENTATION)

33. CHIP (CULTURAL HERITAGE
INFORMATION PRESENTATION)

34. CHIP (CULTURAL HERITAGE
INFORMATION PRESENTATION)

35. CHIP (CULTURAL HERITAGE
INFORMATION PRESENTATION)

36. CULTURAL HERITAGE OF
CANTABRIA
W3C Case Study
by the Fundación Marcelino Botín
 11 types of cultural heritage items from 300
sources about Cantabria, Spain.
 Using semantic technologies remedies the spread
of data in various forms, and digitization
processes.
 Increases access to all citizens by creating a
repository for cultural heritage

37. CANTABRIA
HTTP://193.144.180.22:8080
 Prototype in Spanish
 Features maps, timeline, user-generated wiki, faceted
browsing and search results, tourist guide

38. CHALLENGES WITH CANTABRIA
 Problems are not technology related, but rather
political
 Search results and data were skewed towards
certain areas or people within Cantabria

39. CHALLENGES AND THE FUTURE OF
CULTURAL HERITAGE COLLECTIONS
 Large variety of objects- who has ownership?
 Who can give metadata, label authority files?
 Currently, only prototypes are available for
searching cultural heritage collections
semantically. Will people come around to the idea
of Semantic Web?

40. QUESTIONS
 Is the Semantic Web a realistic goal?
 How will it be implemented?
 What challenges do you foresee?
 Is cultural heritage a realistic area to show
semantically? What about other areas- travel,
health, business, social media

41. BIBLIOGRAPHY
 Angjeli, A., Isaac, A., Cloarec, T., Martin, F., Meij, L., Matthezing, H., & Schloback, S. (2009).
Semantic Web and Vocabulary Interoperability: an Experiment with Illumination
Collections. International Cataloguing and Bibliographic Control, 38(2), 25-9. Retrieved from
Library Lit & Inf Full Text database
 Antoniou, G. & van Harmelen, F. (2004). A semantic web primer. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The
MIT Press.
 Brynko, B. (2010) The power of the semantic web. Information Today. no5 p. 10.
 CHIP @ Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. (2008). CHIP (Cultural Heritage Information Presentation)
Homepage. Retrieved from http://chip-project.org/
 Concordia, C., Gradmann, S., & Siebinga, S. (2010). Not just another portal, not just
another digital library: A portrait of Europeana as an application program interface. IFLA
Journal, 36(1), 61-9. doi: 10.1177/0340035209360764
 CultureSampo (2010). Finnish culture on the semantic web 2.0. Retrieved from http://
www.kulttuurisampo.fi/?lang=en
 Doszkocs, T. (2010 July/August). Semantic search engines mean well. Online Magazine vol34 no 4.
p.36-42.
 Dunsire, Gordon. (2008). Said the spider to the fly: identity and authority and the
semantic web. (based on keynote at CIG conference 2008, Glasgow) Manchester: CILIP
Cataloguing and Indexing Group.
 Europeana Foundation. (2010). Europeana. Retrieved from http://www.europeana.eu/portal/
index.html
 Fundacion Marcelino Botin (2009). Patrimonio de Cantabria: todo el patrimonio cultural y natural
de Cantabria. Retrieved from http://193.144.180.22:8080/web/guest/ home
 Getty’s Research Institute. (2010). Getty Vocabularies. Retrieved from http://www.getty.edu/
research/tools/vocabularies/index.html

42. BIBLIOGRAPHY
 Herman, I. (2010, June 22). Introduction to semantic web technologies. Retrieved from
http://www.w3.org/2010/Talks/0622-SemTech-IH/Tutorial.pdf
 Hernandez, Francisca. (2007, May). Case study: An ontology of Cantabria’s Cultural
Heritage. Retrieved from http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/sweo/public/UseCases/
FoundationBotin/
 Horrocks, I. (2008). Ontologies and the semantic web. Communications of the ACM. vol.51
no.12 p.58-67 Retrieved from Academic Search Premier
 Iconclass. (2010). Retrieved from http://www.iconclass.nl/
 McGuinness, D. L. & van Harmelen, F. (Eds.). (2009). OWL web ontology language
overview. Retrieved from http://www.w3.org/TR/2004/REC-owl-features-20040210/
 Miles, A. & Bechhofer,S. (2009). SKOS Simple Knowledge Organization Reference.
Retrieved from http://www.w3.org/TR/skos-reference/
 MultimediaN N9C E-culture Project. (2008). MultimediaN N9C Eculture project homepage.
Retrieved from http://e-culture.multimedian.nl/
 Rapoza, J. (2004, June 4). Spinning the semantic web. Eweek Labs. www.eweek.com
 Schreiber, G., Amin, A., Aroyo, L., Van Assem, M., de Boer, V., et al. (2008). Semantic
annotation and search for cultural heritage collecitons: The MultimediaN E-
Culture demonstrator. Web semantics: Science, Services, and Agents on the World
Wide Web 6. Elsevier. p.243-249. doi:10.1016/j.websem.2008.08.001
 Solanki, M. Semantic web in cultural heritage and archaeology [SlideShare slides].
Retrieved from http://www.slideshare.net/nimonika/semantic-web-in-cultural-
heritage-and-archaeology
 STITCH @ CATCH. (2005). Semantic interoperability to access cultural heritage. Retrieved
from http://www.cs.vu.nl/STITCH/index.html

43. SEMANTIC WEB AND CULTURAL HERITAGE
RYAN MCCOMAS, LAURA OCHOA PODELL, ARIA PIERCE
KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION FALL 2010
LIS 653.03 DR. PATTUELLI
Using Semantic web with
Cultural Heritage Collections:
Europeana
http://www.europeana.eu
Culture Sampo
http://kultturisampo.fi
Cantabria
Goals of Semantic Web: http://193.144.180.22:8080/web/guest/hom
e
Allows for machines to connect meaning to
data STITCH@CATCH
Benefits- Increases access, allows for http://www.cs.vu.nl/STITCH/index.html
meaningful searches, connects various points MultimediaN N9C E-Culture
of entry, FRBRized and faceted
http://e-culture.multimedian.nl/
Challenges- data needs to be entered and
CHIP
standardized, lots of human work, privacy
Citations
http://chip-project.org/index.html
Antoniou, G. & van Harmelen, F. (2004). A semantic web primer. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Brynko, B. (2010) The Power of the semantic web. Information Today. no5 p. 10.
Schreiber, G., Amin, A., Aroyo, L., Van Assem, M., de Boer, V., et al. (2008). Semantic annotation and search for cultural heritage collecitons: The MultimediaN
E-Culture demonstrator. Web semantics: Science, Services, and Agents on the World Wide Web 6. Elsevier. p.243-249. doi:10.1016/j.websem.2008.08.001