An Ontological Approach for Unlocking the Colonial Archive

Abstract

Cultural Heritage institutions have been exploring new ways of making available their catalogues in digital format. Recently, new approaches have emerged as methods to reuse and make available the contents for computational purposes. This work introduces a methodology to transform digital collections into Linked Open Data following best practices. The framework has been applied to Indigenous and Spanish colonial archives based on the collection Relaciones Geográficas of Mexico and Guatemala provided by the LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections. The results of this work are publicly available. This work aims at encouraging Cultural Heritage institutions to publish and reuse their digital collections using advanced methods and techniques.