Transcript E-Culture: Challenging Use Cases for the Semantic Web

E-Heritage
and the VU Semantic Web group
Guus Schreiber
Computer Science
VU University Amsterdam
Semantic Web @ VU
Amsterdam
• 40 people, two groups: Web & Media
(Schreiber), Knowledge Representation &
Reasoning (van Harmelen)
• A few ongoing projects:
– europeana.eu: EU culture portal
– NL projects on access to cultural heritage: CHIP,
Agora
– EU NoTube: Web & TV semantic integration
– PrestoPrime: user-generated annotations and
content for TV archives
– EU LarKC: platform for massive distributed
incomplete reasoning
Characteristics of the Web
• AAA: Anyone can say Anything about Any
Topic
• The Web is an open world
• It is impossible to enforce unique names
• The networl effect: a virtuous circle
The Web:
resources and links
Web link
URL
URL
The Semantic Web:
typed resources and links
Painting
“Woman with hat
SFMOMA
Dublin Core
ULAN
creator
Henri Matisse
Web link
URL
URL
The myth of a unified vocabulary
• In large virtual collections there are always multiple
vocabularies
– In multiple languages
• Every vocabulary has its own perspective
– You can’t just merge them
• But you can use vocabularies jointly by defining a
limited set of links
– “Vocabulary alignment”
• It is surprising what you can do with just a few links
Exempel use of vocabulary
alignment
“Tokugawa”
AAT style/period
Edo (Japanese period)
Tokugawa
AAT is Getty’s
Art & Architecture Thesaurus
SVCN period
Edo
SVCN is local in-house
ethnology thesaurus
Architecture of a Semantic Web
application
Application
RDF query
& inferencing
RDF store
converters
scrapers
RDF files
Web pages, databases
collections, tables,
Demo using linked data (RPI, Hendler)
http://e-culture.multimedian.nl/demo/search
Search: WordNet patterns that increase
recall without sacrificing precisions
Enriching the metadata
Resulting semantic annotation
Learning vocabulary alignments
• Example: learning relations between art
styles in AAT and artists in ULAN through
NLP of art historic texts
– “Who are Impressionist painters?”
Personalized Rijksmuseum
• Interactive user
modeling
•Recommendations of
artworks and art topics
Mobile museum tour
Video tagging games