General Description
One of the main objectives of the Marcelino Botín Foundation is transmitting scientific discoveries and research results to society by sponsoring collaborative initiatives. The aim of this project is to build and exploit, through the Internet, a complete ontology including eleven forms of cultural heritage from Cantabria, ranging from bibliographic elements to industrial heritage through prehistoric excavations.
The background
The information regarding this heritage is disperse, heterogeneous and fragmented, and it has different levels of digitalisation. For instance, some documents belong to the Public Administration, some have been published in books or exhibited in cultural exhibitions, some have been digitalised and others are included in data bases. This situation does not allow easy access to the information, which causes integration problems and makes exploiting this data through the Internet more costly. What is more: given the very nature of Cultural Heritage, it is difficult to control due to the dense relationships between its elements, which impedes its exploitation.
The Solution
The solution consisted in the use of semantic web technologies to achieve an intelligent integration of the information related to the Cultural Heritage of Cantabria. The project designs, builds, develops and exploits an ontology of Cultural Heritage and it develops a methodology of population and exploitation for using ontologies in other regions. The information can be accessed through a Semantic Portal that incorporates several applications.
The ontology is based on several existing standards, such as the Reference Conceptualisation Model, developed by the International Committee for Documentation of the International Council of Museums, which became an international standard certified by ISO in 2006 (ISO 21127 Information and documentation — A reference ontology for the interchange of cultural heritage information); the Dublin Core (ISO Standard 15836) for description of resources; and the model for Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR), an entity-relationship model developed by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA).
The population of the ontology is performed semi-automatically from different sources, including structured websites, spreadsheets, MARC21 XML bibliographic records, generic XML documents and relational data bases. The contents of the ontology are published on the Internet in real time applying filters and taking as much advantage as possible of the relationship between elements (serendipity).
As well as enriched browsing, the portal offers semantic applications, such as a semantic search engine that allows users to find information on the ontology through specific questions. For instance, the question “Books published between 1907 and 1917 written by authors from Santander” returns a list of concordances that represent the books themselves, as opposed to the classic list of links to such documents.
The application generates learning objects in SCROM format, which can be used by the existing e-learning platforms. The objects are generated in specific courses in accordance with the course syllabus. For instance, when selecting a particular person, a course focused on their life and work may be created.
The portal can be transformed into very valuable help for a time of tourist applications. Several tourist operators give added value to their tourist trips by offering cultural experiences related to each destination. Cultural ontology is prepared for offering this added value (through online services) to those online agencies that offer thematic cultural itineraries, such as celebrities, time periods, artwork, etc.
Main benefits of the use of Semantic Website Technologies
The main benefits of the Botín Foundation project include:
- An integrated and coordinated database containing the cultural heritage of Cantabria, which enables society to access cultural knowledge in an inexpensive and scalable way.
- An only access point is offered to those users who are interested in receiving cultural information about Cantabria.
- The ontology guarantees the relationship between different applications, allowing new applications to be integrated easily.
- Due to the fact that ontology is based on market standards, interoperation and federation with other databases is possible.
- The possibility of exporting knowledge and applications to other regions.
