A Framework for Improved Access to Museum Databases in the Semantic Web

A Framework for Improved
Access to Museum Databases
in the Semantic Web
Dana Dannélls, Mariana Damova, PhD, Ramona Enache, Milen Chechev

Introduction

Linked Open Data
combining facts and knowledge from different datasets is the
ultimate goal of the Semantic Web

Need for convincing real life use cases demonstrating the benefits
of these technologies

MacManus, the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of ReadWriteWeb
defined an exemplary test for the Semantic Web

cities around the world which have Modigliani art works
Museum Reason-able View September 2011 #2

FactForge of Ontotext solves the Modigliani query

The cultural heritage domain can become a useful usecase for the application of semantic
technologies.


Outline

• Linked Open Data – the Vision
• Reason-able View – Linked Open Data Management
• Museum Reason-able View – Data
• Museum Reason-able View – Environment
• Ontology based verbalization of triple results
• Related Work
• Conclusion


Linked Open Data – the Vision
Tim Berners-Lee
graphs published on the web and explorable across servers in a manner similar
to the way the HTML web is navigated

Design principles of Linked Open Data
– Use URIs to identify things.
– Use HTTP URIs so that these things can be referred to and looked up
("dereferenced") by people and user agents.
– Provide useful information about the thing when its URI is dereferenced, using
standard formats such as RDF/XML.
– Include links to other, related URIs in the exposed data to improve discovery of
other related information on the Web.


Linked Open Data Cloud

258 datasets as of september 2011


Reason-able View – Linked Open Data Management

Using linked data for data management is considered to have great potential for
the transformation of the web of data into a giant global graph (Heath, & Bizer,
2011). Still, there are several challenges that have to be overcome to make this
possible, namely:

• LOD are hard to comprehend;
• Diversity comes at a price;
• LOD is unreliable;
• Dealing with data distributed on the web is slow;
• No consistency is guaranteed.

Using reason-able views (Kiryakov et al., 2009a) – a solution to LOD management.


Reason-able View – Linked Open Data Management

• An approach for reasoning with and managing linked data

- an assembly of independent datasets, which can be used as a single body of
knowledge with respect to reasoning and query evaluation
- lowering the cost and the risks of using specific linked datasets for specific
purposes

• The linkage between the data
- at the schema level
- at the instance level

• Accessible via
- SPARQL endpoint
- keywords

• Queries with predicates from different datasets
• “Federated” results from different datasets


Museum Reason-able View – Data

• Requirements:

- the ability to handle generic knowledge, such as people, institutions, and locations
- the ability to handle specific subject domains, such as the cultural heritage and
museums

• Datasets covering the Generic Knowledge of the Museum Reason-able View.

- DBpedia - the RDF-ized version of Wikipedia, describing more than 3.5 million things
and covers 97 languages.
- Geonames - a geographic database that covers 6 million of the most significant
geographical features on Earth.
- PROTON - an upper-level ontology, 542 entity classes and 183 properties.


Museum Reason-able View – Museum Data Models

• CIDOC – CRM
developed by the International Council of Museum’s Committee for Documentation
(ICOM-CIDOC)

an upper-level ontology for cultural and natural history
for museum professionals to perform their work well

90 classes and 148 properties

- Entity, Temporal Entity, Time Span, Place, Dimension,
- Production, Creation, Dissolution, Acquisition, Curation


K-samsök, the Swedish Open Cultural Heritage (SOCH)

• a Web service for applications to retrieve data from cultural heritage institutions or
associations with Cultural Heritage information.
• includes features which are divided in the following categories:

- Identification of the item in the collection
- Internet address, and thumbnail address
- Description of the item
- Description of the presentation of the item, including a thumbnail
- Geographic location coordinates
- Museum information about the item
- Context, when was it created, to which style it belongs, etc.
- Item specification, e.g. size, and type of the item – painting, sculpture and the like



Painting Ontology
OWL 2
182 classes and 92 properties

<owl:Class rdf:about="&painting;Painting">
<owl:equivalentClass>
<owl:Class>
<owl:intersectionOf rdf:parseType="Collection">
<rdf:Description rdf:about="&ksasok;item"/>
<rdf:Description rdf:about="&milo;PaintedPicture"/>
</owl:intersectionOf>
</owl:Class>
</owl:equivalentClass>
<rdfs:subClassOf rdf:resource="&core;E22_Man-Made_Object"/>
</owl:Class>

Integrated with SOCH
Time Ontology
MERGE from SUMO
Mid-Level-Ontology from SUMO

Museum Reason-able View – Gothenburg City Museum Data

8900 museum objects in two museum collections – GSM and GIM
GSM – Gothenburg Stads Museum
GIM – Gothenburg Industry Museum

39 properties describe each museum object in each collection

The Gothenburg City Museum data is integrated by using predicates from :
- CIDOC-CRM
- PROTON
- Painting Ontology
- linkages to DBpedia


Museum Reason-able View – Architecture


Museum Reason-able View – Museum Data Triplification

Process of triplification and localization of Gothenburg City Museum data in English.


Museum Reason-able View – Environment

• OWLIM
• Ontologies and data loaded with full materialization
– Dbpedia 3.6, Geonames 2.2.1, PROTON 3.0, CIDOC-CRM 1.0, GCM data

• 20% more retrievable statements than loaded explicit
statements
– 257,774,678 (explicit)
– 305,313,536 (retrievable)

• SPARQL endpoint
– Museum artefacts preserved in the museum since 2005
– Paintings from the GSM collection
– Inventory numbers of the paintings from the GSM collection
– Location of the objects created by Anders Hafrin
– Paintings with length less than 1 m
– etc.
http://museum.ontotext.com


Museum Reason-able View – Access and Querying

http://museum.ontotext.com/sparql


Ontologies Verbalization

• The Grammatical Framework (GF)
- key feature is the division of a grammar in the abstract syntax which
acts as a semantic interlingua and the concrete syntaxes-
representing verbalizations in various target languages (natural or
formal).
- a resource library (Ranta, 2009), where the abstract syntax
describes the most common grammatical constructions allowing text
generation, which are further mapped to concrete syntaxes
corresponding to 18 languages.


Museum Reason-able View Verbalization

• subclass relation rdfs:subClassOf from the ontology are
encoded as functions in the GF grammar
• Other information stated in the ontology, is encoded in GF as axioms
• The natural language generation is based on composeable templates
Example: OWL entry corresponding to the painting Big Garden:
<owl:NamedIndividual rdf:about="&painting; BigGardenObj">
<rdf:type rdf:resource="&painting;Painting"/>
<isPaintedOn rdf:resource="&painting;Canvas"/>
<createdBy rdf:resource="&painting;CarlLarsson"/>
<hasCreationDate rdf:resource="&painting;Year1937"/>
</owl:NamedIndividual>


Museum Reason-able View Verbalization

• fun BigGardenObj : Ind Painting ;

• A set of Axioms
– isPaintedOn (el BigGradenObj) (el Canvas)
– createdBy (el BigGardenObj)(el CarlLarsson)
– hasCreationDate (el BigGardenObj) (el (year 1937))

• Generated sentences
– Big Garden is a painting
– Big Garden is painted on canvas
– Big Garden is painted by Carl Larsson
– Big Garden was created in 1937


GF Abstract Representation to English Syntax

• Abstract Representation for CreationDate
fun Painting_hasCreationDate : El Painting_Artwork
-> El Painting_TimePeriod -> Formula ;

• GF syntactic rule for CreationDate
lin Painting_hasCreationDate o1 o2 =
mkPolSentPast (S.mkCl o1 (S.mkVP (S.passiveVP create_V2) (S.mkAdv in_Prep o2))) ;


Related Work
MAO – Finland
http://www.seco.tkk.fi/projects/finnonto/
Europeana – EU
http://www.europeana.eu/portal/
VUA – Amsterdam Museum with semantic technologies
within Europeana connect
British Museum – Research Space
just won tender funded by Melon foundation

Contribution of the paper:
First to link real museum data to LOD
First to use schema-level mapping to data integration in a specific domain like
cultural heritage
Ontology-based verbalization of query result triples


Conclusion
A framework for integrating and accessing museum linked data
A method to present this data using natural language generation technology
A Museum Reason-able View
- a series of upper-level and domain specific ontologies used to transform
Gothenburg museum data from a relational database into RDF
- links to LOD cloud data
Templates automatically obtained in GF to generate the query results in natural language

Future work
Experiments with the Museum Reason-able view
Extension of the data
Increasing the coverage of the GF grammar
Fluent discourse generation from ontologies
MOLTO, FP7-ICT-247914

References
• Tim Berners-Lee. 2004. OWL Web Ontology Language reference, February. W3C Recommendation. T.
Berners-Lee. 2006. Design issues: Linked data. Retrieved from
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html.
• B. Bishop, A. Kiryakov, D. Ognyanoff, I. Peikov, Z. Tashev, and R. Velkov. 2011. Owlim: A family of
scalable semantic repositories. Semantic Web Journal, Special Issue: Real-World Applications of OWL.
• Nick Crofts, Martin Doerr, Tony Gill, Stephen Stead, and Matthew Stiff, 2008. Definition of the CIDOC
Conceptual Reference Model.
• Mariana Damova and Dana Dannells. 2011. Reasonable view of linked data for cultural heritage. In
Proceedings of the third International Conference on Software, Services and Semantic Technologies
(S3T).
• Ramona Enache and Krasimir Angelov. 2010. Typeful ontologies with direct multilingual
verbalization. Workshop on Controlled Natural Languages (CNL) 2010.
• Bernhard Haslhofer and Antoine Isaac. 2011. data.europeana.eu the europeana linked open data
pilot. In Proceedings of the Intl. Conf. on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications.
• Aarne Ranta. 2009. The GF resource grammar library. Linguistic Issues in Language Technology, 2(2).


Thank you for your attention!

Questions

mariana.damova@ontotext.com


A Framework for Improved Access to Museum Databases in the Semantic Web

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