A Cloud-Native Web Application for Assisted Metadata Generation and Retrieval: THESPIAN-NER

Abstract

Within the context of the Competence Centre for the Conservation of Cultural Heritage (4CH) project, the design and deployment of a platform-as-a-service cloud infrastructure for the first European competence centre of cultural heritage (CH) has begun, and some web services have been integrated into the platform. The first integrated service is the INFN-CHNet web application for FAIR storage of scientific analysis on CH: THESPIAN-Mask. It is based on CIDOC-CRM-compatible ontology and CRMhs, describing the scientific metadata. To ease the process of metadata generation and data injection, another web service has been developed: THESPIAN-NER. It is a tool based on a deep neural network for named entity recognition (NER), enabling users to upload their Italian-written report files and obtain labelled entities. Those entities are used as keywords either to serve as (semi)automatically custom queries for the database, or to fill (part of) the metadata form as a descriptor for the file to be uploaded. The services have been made freely available in the 4CH PaaS cloud platform.