Integrating Wiki Systems, Natural Language Processing, and Semantic Technologies for Cultural Heritage Data Management

Abstract

Modern documents can easily be structured and augmented to have the characteristics of a semantic knowledge base. Many older documents may also hold a trove of knowledge that would deserve to be organized as such a knowledge base. In this chapter, we show that modern semantic technologies offer the means to make these heritage documents accessible by transforming them into a semantic knowledge base. Using techniques from natural language processing and Semantic Computing, we automatically populate an ontology. Additionally, all content is made accessible in a user-friendly Wiki interface, combining original text with NLP-derived metadata and adding annotation capabilities for collaborative use. All these functions are combined into a single, cohesive system architecture that addresses the different requirements from end users, software engineering aspects, and knowledge discovery paradigms. The ideas were implemented and tested with a volume from the historic Encyclopedia of Architecture and a number of different user groups.