CultureSampo-Finnish Culture on the Semantic Web: The Vision and First Results

This paper concerns the idea of publishing heterogenous cultural content on the Semantic Web. By heterogenous content we mean metadata describing potentially any kind of cultural objects, including artifacts, photos, paintings, videos, folklore, cultural sites, cultural process descriptions, biographies, history etc. The metadata schemas used are different and the metadata may be represented at different levels of semantic granularity. This work is an extension to previous research on semantic cultural portals, such as MuseumFinland, that are usually based on a shared homogeneous schema, such as Dublin Core, and focus on content of similar kinds, such as artifacts. Our experiences suggest that a semantically richer event-based knowledge representation scheme than traditional metadata schemas is needed in order to support reasoning when performing semantic search and browsing. The new key idea is to transform different forms of metadata into event-based knowledge about the entities and events that take place in the world or in fiction. This approach facilitates semantic interoperability and reasoning about the world and stories at the same time, which enables implementation of intelligent services for the end-user. These ideas are addressed by presenting the vision and solution approaches taken in two prototype implementations of a new kind of cross-domain semantic cultural portal “CULTURESAMPO—Finnish Culture on the Semantic Web”. 1 Towards Semantic Crossdomain Interoperability A widely shared goal of cultural institutions is to provide the general public and the researchers with aggregated views to cultural heritage, where the users are able to access the contents of several heterogenous distributed collections of institutions simultaneously. In this way, the organizational and technical obstacles for information retrieval between collections and organizations, even between countries and languages could be crossed. Content aggregation may occur at the syntactic or semantic level. The basis for syntactic interoperability is sharing syntactic forms between different data sources, i.e., the metadata schemas such as the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set1 or the Visual Re1http://dublincore.org/documents/1998/09/dces/ source Association’s (VRA) Core Categories2. Such schemas make it possible to identify different aspects of the search objects, such as the “author”, “title”, and “subject” of a document, and focus search according to these. Syntactic interoperabilty facilitates, for example, multior metasearch3. Here the user types in a query in a metaportal. The query is then distributed to a set of underlying systems and the results are aggregated for the end-user. For example, the Australian Museums and Galleries Online4 and Artefacts Canada5 are multi-search engines over nation-wide distributed cultural collections. Here the content includes metadata about museum artifacts, publications etc. represented using shared metadata schemas. Content aggregation at the semantic level means that not only the form of the data is shared and in2http://www.vraweb.org/vracore3.htm 3http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasearch engine 4http://www.amonline.net.au/ 5http://www.chin.gc.ca/