The cultural sector & the semantic web... did you know those two are close friends?  It’s not immediately what you might expect, but the Semantic Web sure is a hot topic in the cultural sector in Belgium and the Netherlands.

Last week’s seminar on The Digital Future of Cultural Heritage had to limit their registration up to 100 participants. We know that ‘semantic’ is the buzz-word wherever you go, but the large attendance in this specific sector made me wonder what is linking them. Why is the cultural sector interested in semantic web technologies?

Could it be the tremendous need to integrate distributed information? The organizer of the seminar – erfgoedplus.be (what would literally translate into heritageplus.be) – has the mission to make information about cultural heritage accessible to the large public. This information comes from diverse collections and is gathered into one centralized database. Semantics get in the picture when the data is published. The assembled data is published as RDF, to make faceted navigation possible on the portal.

Faceted navigation makes the portal user-friendly.  Visitors can find item in collections across Limburg and Flemish-Brabant and browse through different aspects like location, creator, style and much more. 

The same initiative happens on European scale in a project named Europeana. Objective is– parallel to the Flemish initiative - to bring together Europe’s cultural heritage in a digital way and unlock it to the large public. November 2008 a first prototype went online, where you can browse through 6 million digital items.

screenshot of the Europeana portal with faceted navigation

Aggregating this size of project brings along new challenges. A key finding at the seminar was the friction between content providers to agree on a common standard for classification, and whether this consensus should be reached on European, national or rather local level. Of course Semantic Technology offers the opportunity to map taxonomies onto each other, as soon as they are published in a common format like SKOS. This is the most probable way to work towards the future. TenForce already implements this approach in developing a taxonomy management system for jobs, occupations and skills for the European Commission.

Back to the main question, what could explain the interest of the cultural sector in semantic technology? It’s not just the faceted navigation obviously, which is merely an efficient tool. When preserving cultural heritage, you are quickly confronted with the biggest hurdle to take: how will all these items be categorized? The cultural sector is very familiar with controlled vocabularies such as thesauri and taxonomies, they have been working with it since ages. This gives them a significant head start!

A remarkable finding: when asking people who work in the cultural sector about metadata standards, guess how many of them know Dublin Core? More than 25 percent! IT people don’t get even close, although it’s the foundation of semantic thesauri standards…

Faceted browsing is a nice example of what semantic web technologies can do. When you are looking for a specific item, it makes sense to categorize all search results according to a given facet. Let’s say you are looking for ‘thriller’ on web, it would be nice if the difference was immediately clear between search results referring to the movie genre and the ones about Michael Jackson’s album.

Browsing is in many cases a more user-friendly approach than searching. In many cases the user is in fact looking for peripheral information on a subject, rather than one – the most relevant - answer. When you find the ‘thriller’ album you were looking for, chances are big that you’re also interested in where to buy it and who else likes it. Faceted browsing allows you to change your selection and all relevant criteria change simultaneously. Changed your mind about the album? Browse through the other Michael Jackson albums and again you find where to buy it and who else likes it.

The faceted browser we like most is called Pelorus. No wonder we like it, the design is very intuitive and the technology behind it is pure semantics. Try out this nice demo of Pelorus and experience the ease and beauty of faceted browsing!