Barriers for the access to knowledge models in Linked Data cultural heritage collections

Abstract

During last years governments have promoted the digitisation and on-line access to cultural heritage due to its importance for supporting the knowledge economy. Initiatives like Europeana or UNESCO Memory of the World Programme have encouraged the creation of cultural heritage repositories, which currently contain millions of digitized items. Many of these repositories have adopted semantic web technologies and Linked Data approaches for their publication. However, the way in which they are described does not follow in many cases the best practices in the field. This work details the problems identified when analyzing the way the cultural heritage resources are classified in these semantic repositories. It specifically focuses on the content of the thematic annotation of these resources, but many of the identified problems can be extrapolated to other descriptors.