Abstract

Museums around the world have built databases with metadata about millions of objects, the people who created them, and the entities they represent. This data is stored in proprietary databases and is not readily available for use. Recently, museums embraced the Semantic Web as a means to make this data available to the world, but the experience so far shows that publishing museum data to the Linked Data cloud is difficult: the databases are large and complex, the information is richly structured and varies from museum to museum, and it is difficult to link the data to other datasets. We have been collaborating with the Smithsonian American Art Museum to create a set of tools that allow museums and other cultural heritage institutions to publish their data as Linked Open Data. In this demonstration we show the end-to-end process of starting with the original source data, modeling the data with respect to a ontology of cultural heritage data, linking the data to DBpedia, and then publishing the information as Linked Data.
Recently there have been a number of efforts to publish metadata about the objects in museums as Linked Open Data (LOD). Some notable efforts include the Euopeana project [2], which published data on 1,500 of Europe’s museums, libraries, and archives, the Amsterdam Museum [1], which published data on 73,000 objects, and the LODAC Museum [4], which published data from 114 museums in Japan. Despite the many recent efforts, there are still significant challenges in publishing data about artwork to the Linked Data cloud. In particular, the past work requires a user to manually convert their data into RDF and there has …

Date

October 23, 2013

Authors

Craig A Knoblock, Pedro A Szekely, Shubham Gupta, Animesh Manglik, Ruben Verborgh, Fengyu Yang, Rik Van de Walle

Conference

ISWC (Posters & Demos)

Pages

129-132