Publishing museum collections on the semantic web: the museumfinland portal

ABSTRACT

Museum collections contain large amounts of data and semantically rich, mutually interrelated metadatain heterogeneous databases. The publication of museum collections on the web is therefore a very promising application domain for semantic web techniques. We present a semantic web portal called MuseumFinland - Finnish Museums on the Semantic Web¹" [3]that contains some 4,000 cultural artifacts from the collections of three museums using three different database schemas and database systems. The system is based on seven RDF(S) ontologies consisting of some 10,000 classes and individuals.

REFERENCES

• 1: C. Goble, S. Bechhofer, L. Carr, D. De Roure, and W. Hall. Conceptual open hypermedia = the semantic web? In Proceedings of the WWW2001, Semantic Web Workshop, Hongkong, 2001.
• 2: Marti Hearst , Ame Elliott , Jennifer English , Rashmi Sinha , Kirsten Swearingen , Ka-Ping Yee, Finding the flow in web site search, Communications of the ACM, v.45 n.9, September 2002 [doi>10.1145/567498.567525]
• 3: E. Hyvönen, M. Junnila, S. Kettula, E. Mäkelä, S. Saarela, M. Salminen, A. Syreeni, A. Valo, and K. Viljanen. MuseumFinland---Finnish Museums on the Semantic Web. User's perspective. In Proceedings of Museums and the Web 2004(MW2004), Arlington, Virginia, USA , 2004.
• 4: E. Hyvönen, S. Saarela, and K. Viljanen. Ontogator: combining view- and ontology-based search with semantic browsing. In Proceedings of the XML Finland 2003 conference. Kuopio, Finland, 2003.
• 5: E. Hyvönen, M. Salminen, S. Kettula, and M. Junnila. A content creation process for the semantic web. In Proceeding of OntoLex 2004: Ontologies and Lexical Resources in Distributed Environments, Lisbon, Portugal, 2004 (forthcoming).
• 6: A. S. Pollitt. The key role of classification and indexing in view-based searching. Technical report, University of Huddersfield, UK, 1998. http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla63/63polst.pdf.
• 7: P. Stuer, R. Meersman, and S. De Bruyne. The HyperMuseum theme generator system: Ontology-based internet support for active use of digital museum data for teaching and presentations. In Museums and the Web 2001: Selected Papers. Archieves & Museum Informatics, 2001.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.6 Library Automation

General Terms:
Design

Keywords:
content publishing, ontology, semantic web