Enriching media collections for event-based exploration

Abstract

Scholars currently have access to large heterogeneous media collections on the Web, which they use as sources for their research. Exploration of such collections is an important part in their research, where scholars make sense of these heterogeneous datasets. Knowledge graphs which relate media objects, people and places with historical events can provide a valuable structure for more meaningful and serendipitous browsing. Based on extensive requirements analysis done with historians and media scholars, we present a methodology to publish, represent, enrich, and link heritage collections so that they can be explored by domain expert users. We present four methods to derive events from media object descriptions. We also present a case study where four datasets with mixed media types are made accessible to scholars and describe the building blocks for event-based proto-narratives in the knowledge graph.