This paper describes the creation of linked data for cultural heritage domain, using semantic technologies. The Gothenburg city museum data are described according to an ontological model combining a series of upper-level and domain specific ontologies, such as PROTON and CIDOC-CRM, triplified and interlinked with data from LOD, e.g. DBpedia. The implementation is done as a reason-able view of the web of data and the data are loaded in OWLIM semantic repositoyr.

1. A Reason-able View of Linked
Data for Cultural Heritage
Mariana Damova, PhD, Dana Dannélls

2. Introduction
Linked Open Data
combining facts and knowledge from different datasets is the
ultimate goal of the Semantic Web
Need for convincing real life use cases demanstrating the benefits
of these technologies
MacManus, the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of ReadWriteWeb
defined an exemplary test for the Semantic Web
cities around the world which have Modigliani art works
Museum Reason-able View September 2011 #2

3. FactForge of Ontotext solves the Modigliani query
The cultural heritage domain can become a useful usecase for the application
of semantic technologies.
http://factforge.net
Museum Reason-able View September 2011 #3

4. Outline
• Linked Open Data – the Vision
• Reason-able View – Linked Open Data Management
• Museum Reason-able View – Data
• Museum Reason-able View – Environment
• Related Work
• Conclusion
Museum Reason-able View September 2011 #4

5. Linked Open Data – the Vision
Tim Berners-Lee
graphs published on the web and explorable across servers in a manner similar
to the way the HTML web is navigated
Design principles of Linked Open Data
– Use URIs to identify things.
– Use HTTP URIs so that these things can be referred to and looked up
("dereferenced") by people and user agents.
– Provide useful information about the thing when its URI is dereferenced, using
standard formats such as RDF/XML.
– Include links to other, related URIs in the exposed data to improve discovery of
other related information on the Web.
Museum Reason-able View September 2011 #5

6. Linked Open Data Cloud
203 datasets as of september 2010
Museum Reason-able View September 2011 #6

7. Outline
• Linked Open Data – the Vision
• Reason-able View – Linked Open Data Management
• Museum Reason-able View – Data
• Museum Reason-able View – Environment
• Related Work
• Conclusion
Museum Reason-able View September 2011 #7

8. Reason-able View – Linked Open Data Management
Using linked data for data management is considered to have great potential for
the transformation of the web of data into a giant global graph (Heath, & Bizer,
2011). Still, there are several challenges that have to be overcome to make this
possible, namely:
• LOD are hard to comprehend;
• Diversity comes at a price;
• LOD is unreliable;
• Dealing with data distributed on the web is slow;
• No consistency is guaranteed.
Using reason-able views (Kiryakov et al., 2009a) – a solution to LOD management.
Museum Reason-able View September 2011 #8

9. Reason-able View – Linked Open Data Management
• An approach for reasoning with and managing linked data
- an assembly of independent datasets, which can be used as a single body of
knowledge with respect to reasoning and query evaluation
- lowering the cost and the risks of using specific linked datasets for specific
purposes
• The linkage between the data
- at the schema level
- at the instance level
• Accessible via
- SPARQL endpoint
- keywords
• Queries with predicates from different datasets
• “Federated” results from different datasets
Museum Reason-able View September 2011 #9

10. Outline
• Linked Open Data – the Vision
• Reason-able View – Linked Open Data Management
• Museum Reason-able View – Data
• Museum Reason-able View – Environment
• Related Work
• Conclusion
Museum Reason-able View September 2011 #10

11. Museum Reason-able View – Data
• Requirements:
- the ability to handle generic knowledge, such as people, institutions, and locations
- the ability to handle specific subject domains, such as the cultural heritage and
museums
• Datasets covering the Generic Knowledge of the Museum Reason-able View.
- DBpedia - the RDF-ized version of Wikipedia, describing more than 3.5 million things
and covers 97 languages.
- Geonames - a geographic database that covers 6 million of the most significant
geographical features on Earth.
- PROTON - an upper-level ontology, 542 entity classes and 183 properties.
Museum Reason-able View September 2011 #11

12. Museum Reason-able View – Museum Data Models
• CIDOC – CRM
developed by the International Council of Museum’s Committee for Documentation
(ICOM-CIDOC)
an upper-level ontology for cultural and natural history
for museum professionals to perform their work well
90 classes and 148 properties
- Entity, Temporal Entity, Time Span, Place, Dimension,
- Production, Creation, Dissolution, Acquisition, Curation
Museum Reason-able View September 2011 #12

13. Museum Reason-able View – Museum Data Models
K-samsök, the Swedish Open Cultural Heritage (SOCH)
• a Web service for applications to retrieve data from cultural heritage institutions
or associations with Cultural Heritage information.
• includes features which are divided in the following categories:
- Identification of the item in the collection
- Internet address, and thumbnail address
- Description of the item
- Description of the presentation of the item, including a thumbnail
- Geographic location coordinates
- Museum information about the item
- Context, when was it created, to which style it belongs, etc.
- Item specification, e.g. size, and type of the item – painting, sculpture and the like
Museum Reason-able View September 2011 #13

14. Museum Reason-able View – Museum Data Models
MAO (Museum Artefact Ontology)
link between K-samsök, CIDOC-CRM and real museum data
Museum Reason-able View September 2011 #14

15. Museum Reason-able View – Gothenburg City Museum Data
8900 museum objects in two museum collections – GSM and GIM
39 properties describe each museum object
The Gothenburg city mueum data is integrated by using predicates from CIDOC-CRM,
PROTON, MAO, and linkages to DBpedia
Museum Reason-able View September 2011 #15

16. Outline
• Linked Open Data – the Vision
• Reason-able View – Linked Open Data Management
• Museum Reason-able View – Data
• Museum Reason-able View – Environment
• Related Work
• Conclusion
Museum Reason-able View September 2011 #16

17. Museum Reason-able View – Architecture
Process of triplification and localisation of GCM data in English.
Museum Reason-able View September 2011 #17

18. Museum Reason-able View – Environment
• BigOWLIM
• Ontologies and data loaded with full materialization
– Dbpedia 3.6, Geonames 2.2.1, PROTON 3.0, CIDOC-CRM 1.0, MAO, GCM data
• 20% more retrievable statements than loaded explicit
statements (45%)
– 257,774,678 (explicit) -> 369,352,860
– 305,313,536 (retrievable) -> 815,608,338
• SPARQL endpoint
– Museum artefacts preserved in the museum since 2005
– Paintings from the GSM collection
– Inventory numbers of the paintings from the GSM collection
– Location of the objects created by Anders Hafrin
– Paintings with length less than 1 m
– etc.
http://museum.ontotext.com
Museum Reason-able View September 2011 #18

19. Outline
• Linked Open Data – the Vision
• Reason-able View – Linked Open Data Management
• Museum Reason-able View – Data
• Museum Reason-able View – Environment
• Related Work
• Conclusion
Museum Reason-able View September 2011 #19

20. Related Work
MAO – Finland
http://www.seco.tkk.fi/projects/finnonto/
Europeana – EU
http://www.europeana.eu/portal/
VUA – Amsterdam Museum with semantic technologies
within Europeana connect
British Museum – Research Space
just won tender funded by Melon foundation
Contribution of the paper:
First to link real museum data to LOD
First to use schema-level mapping to data integration in a specific domain like
cultural heritage
Museum Reason-able View September 2011 #20

21. Outline
• Linked Open Data – the Vision
• Reason-able View – Linked Open Data Management
• Museum Reason-able View – Data
• Museum Reason-able View – Environment
• Related Work
• Conclusion
Museum Reason-able View September 2011 #21

22. Conclusion
Knowledge Representation Infrastructure
Method of managing linked data
Implementation of Museum Reason-able view
extendable with information from other Swedish museums
links to general knowledge from LOD datasets
Future work
Experiments with the Museum Reason-able view
Querying and Navigation
Extension of the data models, for example with a painting ontology
Querying structured information in natural language
Representing structured results in natural language
MOLTO, FP7-ICT-247914
Museum Reason-able View September 2011 #22

23. Thank you for your attention!
Questions
mariana.damova@ontotext.com
Museum Reason-able View September 2011 #23