CultureSampo - Finnish Cultural Heritage Collections on the Semantic Web 2.0

This paper presents an overview of the SemanticWeb 2.0 application CultureSampo, an ambitious system for creating a collective semantic memory of the cultural heritage of a nation on the Semantic Web 2.0, combining ideas underlying the Semantic Web and the Web 2.0. The system addresses the semantic web challenge of aggregating highly heterogeneous, cross-domain cultural heritage content into a semantically rich intelligent system for human and machine users. At the same time, CultureSampo is an approach to solve the social and practical Web 2.0 challenge of organizing the underlying collaborative ontology development and content creation work of memory organizations and citizens. I. Components of a National Semantic Memory The research question of this paper is: How to publish cultural heritage collections on the web involving virtually all kind of cross-domain contents of memory organizations and citizens? The targeted system should have the following properties: • From the publishers’ viewpoint, it is possible to publish content easily by providing semantic metadata locally. Expensive manual work on the global portal side is minimized. • The contents are automatically linked with other publishers’ contents and get semantically enriched from each other. • Researchers and citizens can contribute to the contents of the system with their own contents and knowledge. • From the end users’ viewpoint, contents can be accessed easily from different user-centric thematic perspectives and contexts. • Intelligent search and browsing services of the application can find answers to questions in addition to data records. • The aggregated contents and services of the system can be reused in external web applications easily as mash-ups. • Multilinguality is supported; language barriers can be overcome. Fulfilling these desires is challenging due to two major reasons: • Semantic challenges. Cultural heritage content is semantically heterogeneous and available in various forms (documents, images, audio tracks, videos, collection items, learning objects etc.), concern various topics (art, history, handicraft etc.), is written in different languages, and is targeted to both nonprofessionals and experts. Furthermore, the content is mutually interlinked, as depicted in figure 1.1. For example, the (meta)data may contain a person’s narrative biography, works of art she created, places of interest where she lived in, Wikipedia articles or novels about or by the person, social connections to other persons, and events in the history that the person was related to. • Organizational challenges. Various mutually independent museums, archives, libraries, media organizations, associations, and individual citizens create cultural heritage content. This kind of distributed content creation model has lead to a situation, where even simple metadata about a single homogenous content type, such as museum artifacts, can be highly incompatible in different institutions [19]. Figure 1.1 Cultural heritage is semantically heterogeneous and mutually linked. This paper presents an overview of CultureSampo [1, 22] addressing these challenges on a national Finnish level, based on semantic web technologies [34] and Web 2.0. The system has been developed since 2004, starting from the portal “MuseumFinland—Finnish Museums on the Semantic Web” [19], as a part the FinnONTO project for building a national level Encyclopedia Artifacts Maps