LOD that Picture: Leveraging Linked Open Data to Enhance Navigation of the Photographic Archive of the Teatro Comunale of Bologna

Abstract

The paper presents the adoption of semantic metadata design and domain entity linking to enrich an opera photographic digital collection, proving how to leverage the Semantic Web to get authoritative information to enrich metadata. The ongoing digitisation program of the photographic archive of the Teatro Comunale di Bologna produced so far more than 8 thousand images over a century of opera seasons. During the design of the browsing application, the initial requirement was to access photos by simple and domain related criteria. Given that the cataloguing process produced some very basic metadata, an LD-aided procedure was developed to enrich metadata through the alignment with two external Knowledge Bases (KBs): WikiData and Corago LOD, the KB about the Italian opera. The result is a web application based on the Omeka S platform that enables users to browse the collection by works, events or portrayed artists. The experimentation confirms both the feasibility and benefits resulting from the adoption of Linked Data to organise and enhance archival information in a performing arts case study.