Using Aligned Ontology Model to Convert Cultural Heritage Resources into Semantic Web

Abstract

Cultural heritage resources are huge and heterogeneous. They include highly structured, very unstructured, and semi-structured data or information obtained from both authorized and unauthorized sources and involving multimedia data including text, audio and video data. With the rapid development of the web, more and more cultural heritage organizations use digital methods to record, store and represent their arts and events. However, searching for information after they are stored is still considered a challenging task. The use of semantic web techniques is proposed here to make the data more structured so that the items in the cultural heritage domain can be fully represented and made easily assessable to the public as much as possible. This paper proposes a method to convert a traditional cultural heritage website into one that is well-designed and content-rich. The method includes an ontology model which could automatically adopt new class and instance as input by asserted and inferred models. It could also align local ontology and external online ontologies. Through the proposed method, this paper also discusses several urgent issues about automatic conversion of data, semantic search and user involvement.