TOMS: A Linked Open Data System for Collaboration and Distribution of Cultural Heritage Artifact Collections of National Museums in Thailand

The cultural heritage artifacts that have been collected in national museums serve as important resources for learning, and contribute to the country’s development. In this work, we present TOMS (Thailand Open Museum System), a semantic-based application designed to enable collaboration and the sharing of a wide range of information among national museums. This is accomplished by using linked open data (LOD) and an ontology model based on accepted museum ontology standards from the CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC CRM). The system is composed of the following three layers: (1) Data Store Layer for maintaining each museum’s database including digital 3D content and standard metadata descriptions, represented in a standard distributed data format; (2) Data Manipulation and Processing Layer for handling data processing and query execution; and (3) System Interface Layer designed for each particular site, to exchange and integrate data with other sites in the network via an LOD SPARQL endpoint. The system operations have been demonstrated through case studies and an evaluation, showing that they are highly effective and useful for both national museums and museum users.