Harmonising the Heterogeneous: Shared Ontologies and Linked Data in Archives, Museums and Libraries

2014 Seminar Series / Monday 17 November, 2014

Cultural Heritage (meta)data is often heterogeneous, multilingual, distributed, semantically interlinked, and produced independently by organisations and individuals using different schemas, tools, and practices. As a result, a fundamental problem area in dealing with this kind of data is to make the content mutually interoperable, so that it can be searched, linked, and presented in a harmonized way across the boundaries of the datasets and data silos. Semantic Web and Linked Data standards and practices are a promising approach to address these issues. However, this is not enough: this paper will argue that we also need a content infrastructure, that is, the actual domain ontologies, metadata models, and data shared by the Cultural Heritage community, and web services that make their integration and use in existing Cultural Heritage systems easy and cost efficient. This talk will discuss the building of a national Linked Data content infrastructure in Finland, focusing on two public services: ONKI Ontology Library Service for publishing and using shared domain ontologies, and Linked Data Finland, a platform for publishing metadata schemas and linked datasets as services.