A linked open data framework to enhance the discoverability and impact of culture heritage

Abstract

Cultural heritage institutions have recently begun to consider the benefits of sharing their collections using linked open data to disseminate and enrich their metadata. As datasets become very large, challenges appear, such as ingestion, management, querying and enrichment. Furthermore, each institution has particular features related to important aspects such as vocabularies and interoperability, which make it difficult to generalise this process and provide one-for-all solutions. In order to improve the user experience as regards information retrieval systems, researchers have identified that further refinements are required for the recognition and extraction of implicit relationships expressed in natural language. We introduce a framework for the enrichment and disambiguation of locations in text using open knowledge bases such as Wikidata and GeoNames. The framework has been successfully used to publish a dataset based on information from the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, thus illustrating how semantic enrichment can help information retrieval. The methods applied in order to automate the enrichment process, which build upon open source software components, are described herein.