Vlachidis, Andreas; Metilli, Daniele; (2023) Sloane Lab: Domain Vocabularies for Semantic Interoperability of Museum Collections. Presented at: New Directions in Museum Analytics, London, UK.

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Abstract

How do domain vocabularies and terminological resources contribute to semantic harmonisation and enrichment of siloed collections in digital infrastructures? What is the role of industry-standard and bespoke museum-owned authority files and terminologies in the process of ‘creating a unified virtual “national collection” by dissolving barriers between different collections and opening UK heritage to the world’ (Towards a National Collection, 2022)? The Sloane Lab 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 task of integrating these disparate records and facilitating interoperable access poses significant challenges. The competency of domain-oriented standardised, high-level ontologies such as CIDOC-CRM to act as a common application layer of data semantics and their capacity to enable innovative ways for cross-searching, contextual exploration and interrogation is well documented in the literature. However, their ability to provide a common conceptual layer of high-level semantics for the purposes of unification, alignment and harmonisation comes at the expense of the specialisation of terminological and typological definitions. This can hinder the discovery and interrogation of resources at a higher level of granularity and limit the opportunities for entity enrichment and linking to external definitions from the Linked Data Cloud. We discuss a method of specialisation of upper-level ontologies by adding an additional level of vocabulary semantics of thesauri, glossary, and authority files to supplement the CIDOC-CRM with specialised terms. In this process, we highlight the role and contribution of museum-based vocabulary resources towards the realisation of unified collections and the opportunities they offer for semantic enrichment, linking and interoperability.

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