Enriching the Greek National Cultural Aggregator with Key Figures in Greek History and Culture: Challenges, Methodology, Tools and Outputs

Abstract

Since 2015, SearchCulture.gr, the Greek cross-domain Cultural Data Aggregator, a service developed by the National Documentation Centre in Greece (EKT), has collected a growing number of 800.000 digitised Cultural Heritage Objects (CHOs) from 73 cultural institutions. Addressing metadata heterogeneity in order to be able to provide advanced search, browsing and filtering options to users has been a key target from the start. Controlled linked data vocabularies for item types, historical periods and themes were developed over the course of the past years and are being used for the semantic enrichment of the CHOs’ metadata. In the current paper we present the challenges, the methodology and tools used over the past 2 years for the process of enriching the aggregated CHOs’ metadata with person entities from a Linked Data vocabulary comprising over 8.200 entries concerning Greek persons that left some mark in history, society, science, letters and art that we created for that purpose. This latest development allows all the works relating to a person to be interlinked and semantically enriched, adds significant browse and search functionalities to the portal and, therefore, opens new horizons for Greek SSH research.