Enriching a small artwork collection through semantic linking

Abstract

Cultural heritage institutions have recently started to explore the added value of sharing their data, opening to initiatives that are using the Linked Open Data cloud to integrate and enrich metadata of their cultural heritage collections. However, each museum and each collection shows peculiarities, which make it difficult to generalize this process and offer one-size-fits-all solutions. In this paper, we report on the integration, enrichment and interlinking activities of metadata from a small collection of verbo-visual artworks in the context of the Verbo-Visual-Virtual project. We investigate how to exploit Semantic Web technologies and languages combined with natural language processing methods to transform and boost the access to documents providing cultural information, i.e., artist descriptions, collection notices, information about technique. We also discuss the open challenges raised by working with a small collection including little-known artists and information gaps, for which additional data can be hardly retrieved from the Web.