Metilli, Daniele; Vlachidis, Andreas; Pearlman, Nina; Sadek, Jawad; Valeonti, Foteini; Nyhan, Julianne; (2024) Exploring Cultural Heritage Collections: The Sloane Lab Knowledge Base. Presented at: UCL Festival of Digital Research & Scholarship, London, UK.

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Abstract

UCL Researchers from across the Department of Information Studies and UCL Research Institute for Collections (RIC) have been collaborating with colleagues at the British Museum, Natural History Museum and the British Library and community and research groups on collections using state of the art technologies. The objective is to leverage knowledge from heritage collections to make a new museum structure fit for the 21st century and the challenges facing it. The Sloane Lab is a £2.5m AHRC funded project, that makes accessible this vast interconnected heritage collection and provides an important case study for future application to leverage UCL’s Collections, under the umbrella of RIC. This presentation will demonstrate the Sloane Lab Knowledge Base (KB), a homogeneous data environment using formal semantics to allow data integration, semantic enrichment, and knowledge discovery across a disparate set of resources. The most fundamental challenge of the KB is the provision of a suitable semantic metadata schema for unifying the catalogues and building a knowledge graph to facilitate resourceful query and visualisation. While most museum catalogues are object-centric, the Sloane Lab’s approach to the modelling of the collection is record-centric, meaning that the record is the central entity that we represent. This approach facilitates the expression of multivocality, i.e., multiple conflicting descriptions of the same object. The KB is based on Semantic Web standards (RDF/S, OWL) and our data model is built on top of the CIDOC CRM. The demonstration will provide a rich insight into the KB’s design and development, our modelling choices and the challenges we addressed, including data disparity, integration facilities, inconsistency, uncertainty, and data absences. The evolving landscape of digital research methodologies and technologies offers a unique opportunity for exploring and understanding cultural heritage collections and asking new and different questions of them. The demonstration will present a detailed case study on the Sloane collection and focus on the intersections between cultural heritage and technology, underscoring the critical concept of 'Collections as Data' and the potential of data-driven research methods in enhancing the accessibility, interpretability, discovery and analysis of collections. Furthermore, we will discuss the semantic definitions and formalisms developed to facilitate interoperable connections among cultural heritage datasets. These have been instrumental in redefining users’ engagement with history, promoting a reinterpretation of historical knowledge through the lens of cross-border interconnections across cultural heritage artifacts, diverse viewpoints, and physical venues. We will explore the data model that we developed to represent a wide variety of items whose descriptions are sourced from historical catalogues, contemporary records, and other data sources. We will conclude by highlighting the opportunities afforded by these technologies for creating data visualisations that not only cater to academic scrutiny but also engage a broader audience. These will help display multivocality and identify data absences to allow a better understanding of the collection. Upon completion, participants will gain a thorough understanding of the technological advancements and methodologies that facilitate a deeper, more nuanced interrogation of cultural heritage data, equipping them with the skills to apply these techniques to their respective domains.

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