7. VIAA FACTS & FIGURES
● Total carriers identified: 650.000
● Total carriers digitised today: 227.000
● About 30% done (but most projects are started)
12. VIAA FACTS & FIGURES in 50% of all
schools
(in < 1 year)
13. VIAA FACTS & FIGURES in 50% of all
schools
Fiat/IFTA
nominee
14. VIAA and thesauri
● VIAA archives collections of
more than 100 organisations
● Multiple sectors with large
differences
● Feasibility study in 2014
“Can we build one ‘unified’
thesaurus and if so: how?”
15. Feasibility study: main outcomes
● One generic thesaurus won’t work
○ Huge discussions on content
○ Very niche thesauri vs. more generalist
● But
○ What about SKOS
○ And what about linking thesauri
16. What about SKOS?
● Standardized way for knowledge organisation
● W3C, semantic web
● Main contents
○ Concepts with descriptions
○ Hierarchy
○ Alternative names
○ Multilingual
○ ...and links: exactMatch, ...
17. What about linking thesauri?
voc1
voc2
• Allows people to work on their own
thesaurus
• Benefit from each others work
• Allow unified search
30. VRT Thesaurus after SKOSification
102.172 terms (concepts)
97.744 terms are linked hierarchically
4.429 topConcepts
212 scopeNotes
6828 relations between terms
31. GTAA
184.484 termen
19.695 terms are linked hierarchically
9 conceptSchemes (persons, locations, …)
90.708 scopeNotes
33.542 relaties
=> published as linked open data J
33. Linking thesauri
Start working with two thesauri
Isolate a part of it (e.g. geographical names)
Compare the resulting terms
- String matching
- or more complex operations
Re-iterate on non-matching terms
39. Result of the linking process
Term # of Links
Subjects (things) 4.167
Names (bands, companies,...) 2.197
Locations 4.011
Persons 11.265
Total 21.640
40. Learnings
● Linking is not (very) technical
● Linking requires knowledge of the sources
● Linking requires human input
● Richer thesaurus: more chance of finding
links
42. Demonstrator - Sources
● VIAA
○ Part of the VRT collection.
○ +/- 35.000 items (of 1 mio records)
○ Annotations and links to the thesaurus
● Sound & Vision
○ ‘Openbeelden’
○ Again: a small part of the archive
○ The annotation of those items.
44. Keyword “migration”
All matching keywords of all search results (grouped & with indicator)
Search results
with highlighted
- matches in
descriptions
- matches in
thesaurus terms
collection indicator
45. Changed the weight towards the North
… more results
from across the
border
46. Clicked video is now the search criterium
Terms with associated with all related video’s
Related video’s
48. Conclusions
● Up until now: we gained a lot of insight in working with
thesauri
○ SKOS
○ Linking thesauri
○ Linked and open data
○ Got a good view on what thesaurus landscape
looks like
● Linking makes thesauri richer, allows for collaborative
work
49. Many more steps ahead
● Select thesauri to start working from
○ Link them where appropriate
○ Reuse existing sources where possible (VIAF, GeoNames, …)
● Manage
○ Good management tool and workflow for thesauri
● Use (integration, integration, integration)
○ Use (public) LOD sources in our collection mgmt system (!)
○ Use them as reference source for term extraction
○ Re-use the terms in user-facing systems