The Benefits of Linking Metadata for Internal and External Users of an Audiovisual Archive

Like other heritage institutions, audiovisual archives adopt structured vocabularies for their metadata management. With Semantic Web and Linked Data now becoming more and more stable and commonplace technologies, organizations are looking now at linking these vocabularies to external sources, for example those of Wikidata, DBPedia or GeoNames. However, the benefits of such endeavors to the organizations are generally underexplored. In this paper, we present an in-depth case study into the benefits of linking the “Common Thesaurus for Audiovisual Archives” (or GTAA) and the general-purpose dataset Wikidata. We do this by identifying various use cases for user groups that are both internal as well as external to the organization. We describe the use cases and various proofs-of-concept prototypes that address these use cases.