Linked Open Data at a Museum of Contemporary Art
Erika Guetti Suca and Flávio Soares Corrêa da Silva University of São Paulo, Institute of Mathematic and Statistics,
São Paulo, Brazil.
{eguetti,fcs}@ime.usp.br
Abstract. Museums around the world have built databases with meta- data about millions of cultural objects. These databases are large and complex, the information is richly structured and varied from museum to museum, and it is difficult to link the data across databases. We are working on a model to support cloud based Linked Data for the Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of São Paulo (MAC-USP), based on information of exhibits and collections. We propose to create logical rules about relationships among cultural heritage items, using RDF as a schema language. Our goal is to unfold implicit relations among these items, this way creating new value by allowing cultural institutions to add and publish information about their collections and exhibits in their corresponding websites.
Keywords: Interoperability, Ontologies, Culture Heritage
1 Introduction
The information technologies has enabled cultural heritage and public organiza- tions to provides access to their collections not only through physical displays but also online, and attract even wider audiences than those that visit the physical museums [9]. This works presents the challenges to publish culture heritage con- tents. Exploring the characterizes the concepts of culture heritage and proposing a model for information sharing. Our goal is create new value by allowing cul- tural institutions to add and publish information about their collections and exhibits in their corresponding websites.
We want to propose a model which allows to obtain one feedback about the goals and interests of users. So, we could think about ways to personalise the information to users. Personalization enables a new communication strat- egy based on a continuous process of interaction, collaboration, learning and adaption between the museum and its visitors. Personalization [11] could im- prove the interaction and experience of visitors on museum websites and with museum guide systems by supporting visitors navigation and assisting them in quiclky finding an appropiate starting point, and in discovering new relevant information.
The present article is organized as follows: in section 2 we exam the related works, in section 3 we describe our proposal and finally in section 4 we discuss our conclusions, at last we have the references.
2 Previous Work
There are several works, but we mainly consider the following:
– The Amsterdam Museum [1] presents a transparent and interactive method- ology for ingesting, converting and linking cultural heritage metadata into Linked Data. They proposed the data from individual cultural heritage in- stituitions can be integrated by mapping to a common metadata model Eu- ropeana Data Model (EDM). They identified these phases: (a) conversion of data to RDF,(b)enriching the RDF,(c)mapping to interoperability layer.
Each phase explains how they treated and supported the data for link Linked Data. The development of our model, at least phase of data processing, uses as the basis this methodology. The work is supported by the Cliopatria Se- mantic Server and Amalgame tool for alignment.
– The Smithsonian American Art Museum [14] describes the process and lessos learned in publishing the data. They defined their process in phases: (a) map to data to RDF, (b) link to external sources, (c) curate the linked data. While development, they described challenges in publishing data about artwork to the linked data cloud, the mains are: data preparation, mappings columns to classes, connecting classes, mapping depends on field values. They helped our proposal to identify the prerequisites and challenges of data before publication.
– The Natural History Museum (NHM) [6] adopts and integrates the strong requirements for metadata management and interoperability with cultural heritage, biodiversity, and learning repositories. They offer tools and ser- vices that allow the participating NHM’s to: (a) uniformily describe and semantically annonate their content according to international standars and specifications, as well as(b) interconnect their digital libraries and expose their Cultural Heritage Object (CHO) metadata records to Europeana. The main features of their arquitecture include the publication of multimedia ob- jects, the semantic linkage of the described objects with well-established con- trolled vocabularies, and real-time colaboration, concurrency among users.
They defined software components for client and server side. In the case of server side, they identified three layer: Service Layer, Business Layer and Data Layer. Their arquitecture was a excellent example for our model.
– The Museum Finland [10] combines benefits of the multi-faced view-based search paradigm with Semantic Web Ontology techniques and reasoning.
Logic rules were used for separating the semantic search and link generation services from the underlying domain specific ontologies. Their architecture consists of three components:(a)the logic server Ontodella: provides the rea- soning services how dynamic semantic link recommendations,(b)the search engine Ontogator: is a generic view-based RDF search engine, responsible
for the multi-facet search and,(c)interface component Ontoviews: binds the services of Ontogator to Ontodella.
These works have successfully achieved the information sharing. But, little has been discussed to get a user’s feedback to personalize the content or create explanations of exhibits. Personalized semantics are necessary for the expression of subjective opinions and subjective inference.
3 The Proposal
Our proposed model is designed to facilitate achieving the following objectives:
exact definitions, terminological interoperability, automatic content enrichement and personalize information. We pretend move business logic from applications into the user’s knowledge model based in ontologies. So, we could create forms to present a guide of history of exhibitions, let to users create their own self- curated experiences. We could experiment by adding rules to your ontologies and discovering how they affect your knowledge bases.
The Figure 1 shows our arquitecture proposal. To implement our model it takes several stages of development depending on each module. We have two important modules, The Client Side and Server Side. In Client Side is responsable for the interaction with the user, the presentation of information as well as the communication with the server when needed. It follows the Model-View- Presentation (MVP) design pattern and accommodates modules with discrete roles in managing and delivering/fetching content from/to Client Browser GUI to /from the Server Side. The main modules on the Client Side are described below:
– The Client Browser GUI refers to the Graphical User Interface presented to the user’s web browser.
– The Views are responsible for their layout. Their dispatch user action events to their corresponding Presenters for processing.
– The Application Manager is a centralized point of control, handling the communication between the Views and the Service Layer. It make calls to the services exposed in the service layer, and notifying Views for their responses.
The main modules on the Server Side are described below:
– The Service Layer controls the communication between the client and server logic by exposing a set of services to the client side. These services comprise the middleware concealing the application’s business logic. The basic system services are:(a)the CRUD Service facilate the creation, retrieval, update and deletion of object or collection cultural.(b)Vocabulary Access Service, enable the access to taxonomic terms, vocabularies, files of persons, places, publicly sourced authority, etc.(c)Concurrency Service provides the basic methods for acquiring/releasing/refreshing locks on Cultural Heritage Object (CHO) or Collection.
MuseumBD
Client Browser GUI
Multilanguage Support
HTTP Server/Client Application Manager
CRUD Services
Concurrency Service Data Interchange
RDF API/Parser XML Parser/API Vocabulary Access Service
Persistency Management
Concurrency Mangement Vocabulary Management
Query
RDF Store Ontology
Reasoner Rules Rule Engine
RDF Store Vocabulary Data LayerBussiness Logic LayerService LayerView Layer Views
CLIENT SIDESERVER SIDE
Fig. 1.Proposed Architecture for Sharing Cultural Heritage
– The Business Logic Layer contains the business logic of the application and separates it from Data Layer and Service Layer. It consists of three components:(a)Persistency Management module management the submis- sion/retrieval of information packages to/from the cultural heritage repos- itory.(b)Vocabulary Management provides access to indexed vocabularies and authority files residing on the Vocabulary Server. Its components are:
Query RDF Store, Ontology Reasoner, Rules engine. These components im- plement semantic relations, using a standard ontology, by example CIDOC- CRM. Finally, (c) Concurrency Management component applies a locking strategy to CHO’s record/collection in order to overcome problems related to the concurrent editing by multiple users.
– The Data Layer, accommodates external systems that are used for persistent data storage.
The module Vocabulary Management is especially important in our project.
Therefore, we selected it first in implementing. A challenge in this module is a separate content creation proces for consolidating the global respository based on local databases. Another challenge is how the content from the museum databases can be imported into global RDF(s). A major goal is to provide the end-user with semantic association links relating colections contents with each other. The process defined in the implementation is in phases: (1) data prepa- ration, conversion or map of data to RDFs, (2) connecting classes, enrichment the RDFs, (3) connection of MAC Museum to the Linked Data Cloud (RDF Store, SPARQL) and(4)transition and maintenance to the Linked Data Cloud, mapping to interoperability layer.
4 Conclusion
We presented an architecture for Sharing Cultural Heritage, and a initial method making possible to link the information Cultural Heritage to the Linked Data Cloud. The process of implementation of the Vocabulary Management module includes the following stages: (1) data preparation, conversion or map of data to RDFs,(2) connecting classes, enrichment the RDFs,(3)connection of MAC Museum to the Linked Data Cloud (RDF Store, SPARQL) and (4) transition and maintenance to the Linked Data Cloud, mapping to interoperability layer.
Our current rearch focuses on conversion of data to RDFs and enrichment the RDFs. Further works we will explain the process of implementation mainly of modules Bussiness logic Layer.
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