SeMap: A project on semantisation and visualisation of cultural heritage data

Abstract

The SeMap project, funded by the BBVA Foundation, has among its main objectives, to provide semantics to digitised heritage objects, and to make this information more accessible through web visualisation systems that use spatio-temporal maps. This project has had the collaboration and support of the Ministry of Culture and Sport of the Spanish Government, through CERES, the Digital Network of Museum Collections in Spain. This network manages data related to more than 400,000 objects, located in 113 museums of different specialities and from various thematic and geographical areas. These data are currently accessible through a web portal, but there is no public access to a knowledge graph with this information. Thanks to the collaboration of this entity, SeMap granted the access to this information. With the adequate process, this data has been represented by a knowledge graph. Using the resources offered by the Google Maps and Geonames APIs, it has been possible to georeferenced the data with an acceptable level of precision. This fact, has allowed the design and development of a spatio-temporal map visualisation system with a high level of interaction. This paper describes the process of creating a knowledge graph with this information, based on the CIDOC-CRM model, and using the CERES Cultural Heritage vocabularies and thesauri. The technologies and techniques used to visualise its contents are also described. Finally, the results of the evaluation of the project with end users are presented. In order to evaluate the project, an evaluation session based on the System Usability Scale (SUS) has been conducted. Forty-five secondary school students participated in this session, accessing the tool from the classroom and with the devices with which they usually work.