Vlachidis, Andreas; (2023) Semantic Web Modelling: Challenges and Opportunities in Small and Large Museum Collections. Presented at: Semantic Web, Cultural Heritage, and Art Historical Knowledge: Conceptual Models, Ontologies, and Epistemological Implications, Málaga, Spain.

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Abstract

Semantic Web technologies foster connection and contextualization. They can benefit museum collections by disclosing information in a scalable and interoperable way, aggregating previously heterogeneous and siloed data. Based on formal languages such as RDF, RDFS or OWL they can describe the meaning and the connections among disparate data to define concepts, entities, and relationships and to facilitate multifaceted retrieval, reasoning, data integration and knowledge reuse. Benefits of Semantic Web technologies to the broader DH domain include but not limited to harmonised views of distributed sources, semantic-based content aggregation, enrichment, search, browsing and recommendation. Over the last decades we have witnessed a proliferation of semantic web projects in the broader cultural heritage domain at a national and European level. Infrastructure programmes, such as EUROPEANA, DARIAH, PARTHENOS and ARIADNEplus, to name but a few, have delivered rich interoperable structures and innovations that advanced the tasks of data integration, sharing, analysis, retrieval, and visualisation. As conceptual models mature and expand, and CIDOC-CRM is becoming an undeniable standard in the domain, we reflect on the challenges and opportunities encountered when semantic web technologies are applied both to regional small and large, globally renowned museum collections. The role and application of semantic modelling is examined through two distinct case studies; a) the regional Archaeological Museum of Tripolis (Greece) of limited digital presence, but with a unique collection of regional antiquities that employed semantic methods to enrich and share their digitised collections holdings and b) the Sloane Lab (UK) that aims to aggregate a multitude of catalogue records (both historic and current, from multiple disciplines) dispersed across the British Museum, Natural History Museum and British Library. The presentation delivers useful insight and highlights the opportunities and challenges both for small heritage organisations and large global institutions when applying high-level semantics to withdraw silo barriers of museum items and enable interoperable and multi-layered representations.

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