Semantic-Based Data Access to Digital Cultural Heritage: A Qualitative Analysis of Linked Open Data Implementation

Automatic storytelling is a broad challenge in research contexts such as Natural Language Processing and Contend Based Image Analysis. Despite the considerable achievements of machine learning techniques in these research fields, combining different approaches to fill the gap between an automatic generated story and human handwriting is hard. This work proposes a novel storytelling framework in the Cultural Heritage domain. We developed our framework based on a Multimedia Knowledge Graph (MKG), a crucial point of our work. Furthermore, we populated our Multimedia Knowledge Graph with a focused crawler that employs deep learning techniques to recognise a multimedia object from web resources. Furthermore, we used a combined approach of deep learning techniques and Linked Open Data (LOD) to retrieve information about images and depicted figures using Instance Segmentation. The system has a dynamic, user-friendly interface that guides the user during the storytelling process. Finally, we evaluated the system from a qualitative and quantitative point of view.

The purpose of this research is to explore and develop the potential of a location-based mobile application to support informal learning in the cultural heritage domain. Since the notion that learning is interweaved with people's daily lives, and also that learners get motivated to learn in different contexts and spaces while they are moving, mobile learning has emerged to support learning throughout a lifetime. This research is going to investigate how mobile technology could be developed to support informal learning with respect to cultural heritage sites, and how learners use mobile technology for learning purposes. A major contribution of this research is to develop a task model for mobile location-based learning in order to provide a general framework for informal learning in the cultural heritage domain. Furthermore, this research will use mixed methods (e.g. Interview, questionnaire and focus group) in order to gather the requirements of users and also the officials who have the responsibility for managing and maintaining cultural heritage sites. Finally, a guideline will be provided for researchers who are working in the cultural heritage domain.

As technology continues to advance and become more integrated into our society, especially in the era of digital transformations, it is imperative that software engineering practices and products are sustainable. However, in the Cultural Heritage domain, sustainability is often overlooked, even though knowledge management solutions are essential for the long-term capture, preservation, and dissemination of cultural heritage in a digital form. This paper aims to address this gap by identifying the key sustainability requirements to consider when designing and developing sustainability-aware knowledge management software solutions for the Cultural Heritage sector. A survey was conducted among professionals with experience in digitizing and managing cultural heritage materials, including cultural heritage experts and software engineers. Despite some differences in the perceived importance of sustainability requirements between the two groups of professionals, the most important sustainability features were mainly agreed upon. The acknowledged requirements encompass features from both the social and technical dimensions of sustainability, such as Usefulness, Effectiveness, and Trust for the former and Maintainability, Functional Suitability, and Efficiency for the latter. The research results provide valuable insights into how domain experts and software engineers view software sustainability in the studied domain. The findings can aid the decision-making process for prioritizing requirements related to sustainability and can serve as recommendations for developing knowledge management information systems in the Cultural Heritage domain with sustainability in mind.

Most cultural promotion and dissemination are nowadays performed through the digitization of heritage sites and museums, a necessary requirement to meet the new needs of the public. Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR), and Virtual Reality (VR) have the potential to improve the experience quality and educational effect of these sites by stimulating users’ senses in a more natural and vivid way. In this respect, head-mounted display (HMD) devices allow visitors to enhance the experience of cultural sites by digitizing information and integrating additional virtual cues about cultural artifacts, resulting in a more immersive experience that engages the visitor both physically and emotionally.This study contributes to the development and incorporation of AR, MR, and VR applications in the cultural heritage domain by providing an overview of relevant studies utilizing fully immersive systems, such as headsets and CAVE systems, emphasizing the advantages that they bring when compared to handheld devices. We propose a framework study to identify the key features of headset-based Extended Reality (XR) technologies used in the cultural heritage domain that boost immersion, sense of presence, and agency. Furthermore, we highlight core characteristics that favor the adoption of these systems over more traditional solutions (e.g., handheld devices), as well as unsolved issues that must be addressed to improve the guests’ experience and the appreciation of the cultural heritage.An extensive search of Google Scholar, Scopus, IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, and Wiley Online Library databases was conducted, including papers published from January 2018 to September 2022. To improve review reporting, the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines were used. Sixty-five papers met the inclusion criteria and were classified depending on the study’s purpose: education, entertainment, edutainment, touristic guidance systems, accessibility, visitor profiling, and management.Immersive cultural heritage systems allow visitors to feel completely immersed and present in the virtual environment, providing a stimulating and educational cultural experience that can improve the quality and learning purposes of cultural visits. Nonetheless, the analyzed studies revealed some limitations that must be faced to give a further impulse to the adoption of these technologies in the cultural heritage domain.

Linked open data in authoring virtual exhibitions

Developed in the context of the Horizon 2020 project SPICE, this paper explores methods and tools for citizen curation, with a focus on designing activities that can effectively elicit and motivate citizens to produce meaningful interpretations and reflections on cultural heritage. Additionally, the paper aims to evaluate the potential of such methods and activities in supporting the analysis and reflection processes within the SPICE Interpretation-Reflection loop (IRL). We explore a selection of narrative-based methods for citizen curation to propose an approach for eliciting meaningful stories related to cultural heritage artifacts from citizens. The proposed approach is subsequently applied in a digital co-design workshop, conducted with members of the SPICE consortium, including the five SPICE museum partners. The collected story contributions are thereafter analysed using qualitative methods and tools adapted from narrative inquiry and the study of narrative identity. The findings provide valuable insights into the potential of narrative-based approaches for citizen engagement in the cultural heritage domain and support the development of the SPICE digital tools for promoting reflection, i.e. sentiment analysis, personalization, recommendation systems, and user- and community modeling tools. In SPICE, such tools play a central role in enabling citizens to create representations of themselves, while also cultivating an understanding and appreciation of similarities and differences across citizen groups. In this direction, the paper offers ideas and insights for designing engaging participatory approaches to elicit citizen input. At the same time, it aims to support the development of digital systems and tools in the cultural heritage domain, with the goal of fostering more inclusive and dynamic representations of citizens and citizen groups.

In recent years, cultural heritage institutions have experimented with opening up cultural heritage data and encouraging its reuse. While a growing body of digital humanities research focuses on the value of open data for cultural heritage and the development of data infrastructure, there is limited work exploring open data access and reuse in the cultural heritage domain at the user level. My PhD research aims to address this issue by investigating the practical process of cultural heritage open data access and reuse from the perspective of users. Specifically, I aim to: 1) identify the primary users of cultural heritage open data and their purpose, and 2) investigate the needs of individual data users and institutional data users, as well as how they locate, understand, and reuse cultural heritage open data. The findings will provide insights from a user perspective to facilitate the access and reuse of cultural heritage data, thereby unlocking its value and fostering sustainable development of cultural heritage data.

In cultural heritage, many projects execute Named Entity Linking (NEL) through global Linked Open Data (LOD) references in order to identify and disambiguate entities in their local datasets. It allows users to obtain extra information and contextualise the data with it. Thus, the aggregation and integration of heterogeneous LOD are expected. However, such development is still limited partly due to data quality issues. In addition, analysis on the LOD quality has not sufficiently been conducted for cultural heritage. Moreover, most research on data quality concentrates on ontology and corpus level observations. This paper examines the quality of the eleven major LOD sources used for NEL in cultural heritage with an emphasis on instance-level connectivity and graph traversals. Standardised linking properties are inspected for 100 instances/entities in order to create traversal route maps. Other properties are also assessed for quantity and quality. The outcomes suggest that the LOD is not fully interconnected and centrally condensed; the quantity and quality are unbalanced. Therefore, they cast doubt on the possibility of automatically identifying, accessing, and integrating known and unknown datasets. This implies the need for LOD improvement, as well as the NEL strategies to maximise the data integration.

With the mass digitization of cultural heritage and the increase of people accessing the digitized memory objects, it becomes crucial to develop meaningful interaction patterns in cultural heritage information systems. This explorative study is based on an investigation of 50 websites from the cultural heritage domain. It derives a framework for classifying user interactions with digital cultural heritage. The framework has two dimensions; the first one is a classification of the interactions and the second one describes their degree of complexity. The strength of this framework is the ability to compare complexity, scope and purpose of interactions across different websites while offering a meaningful vocabulary for discussing different interaction features.

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PurposeThis study applies digital humanity tools (Gephi and Protégé) for establishing and visualizing ontologies in the cultural heritage domain. According to that, this study aims to develop a novel evaluation approach using five ontology indicators (data overview, visual presentation, highlight links, scalability and querying) to evaluate the knowledge structure presentation of cultural heritage ontology.Design/methodology/approachThe researchers collected and organized 824 pieces of government’s open data (GOD), converted GOD into the resource description framework format, applied Protégé and Gephi to establish and visualize cultural heritage ontology. After ontology is built, this study recruited 60 ontology participants (30 from information and communications technology background; 30 from cultural heritage background) to operate this ontology and gather their different perspectives of visual ontology.FindingsBased on the ontology participant’s feedback, this study discovered that Gephi is more supporting than Protégé when visualizing ontology. Especially in data overview, visual presentation and highlight links dimensions, which is supported visualization and demonstrated ontology class hierarchy and property relation, facilitated the wider application of ontology.Originality/valueThis study offers two contributions. First, the researchers analyzed data on East Asian architecture with novel digital humanities tools to visualize ontology for cultural heritage. Second, the study collected participant’s feedback regarding the visualized ontology to enhance its design, which can serve as a reference for future ontological development.

Last years witnessed a shift from the potential utility in digitisation to a crucial need to enjoy activities virtually. In fact, before 2019, data curators recognised the utility of performing data digitisation, while during the lockdown caused by the COVID-19, investing in virtual and remote activities to make culture survive became crucial as no one could enjoy Cultural Heritage in person. The Cultural Heritage community heavily invested in digitisation campaigns, mainly modelling data as Knowledge Graphs by becoming one of the most successful Semantic Web technologies application domains. Despite the vast investment in Cultural Heritage Knowledge Graphs, the syntactic complexity of RDF query languages, e.g., SPARQL, negatively affects and threatens data exploitation, risking leaving this enormous potential untapped. Thus, we aim to support the Cultural Heritage community (and everyone interested in Cultural Heritage) in querying Knowledge Graphs without requiring technical competencies in Semantic Web technologies. We propose an engaging exploitation tool accessible to all without losing sight of developers’ technological challenges. Engagement is achieved by letting the Cultural Heritage community leave the passive position of the visitor and actively create their Virtual Assistant extensions to exploit proprietary or public Knowledge Graphs in question-answering. By accessible to all, we mean that the proposed software framework is freely available on GitHub and Zenodo with an open-source license. We do not lose sight of developers’ technical challenges, which are carefully considered in the design and evaluation phases. This article first analyses the effort invested in publishing Cultural Heritage Knowledge Graphs to quantify data developers can rely on in designing and implementing data exploitation tools in this domain. Moreover, we point out challenges developers may face in exploiting them in automatic approaches. Second, it presents a domain-agnostic Knowledge Graph exploitation approach based on virtual assistants as they naturally enable question-answering features where users formulate questions in natural language directly by their smartphones. Then, we discuss the design and implementation of this approach within an automatic community-shared software framework (a.k.a. generator) of virtual assistant extensions and its evaluation in terms of performance and perceived utility according to end-users. Finally, according to a taxonomy of the Cultural Heritage field, we present a use case for each category to show the applicability of the proposed approach in the Cultural Heritage domain. In overviewing our analysis and the proposed approach, we point out challenges that a developer may face in designing virtual assistant extensions to query Knowledge Graphs, and we show the effect of these challenges in practice.

This article explores and presents innovative methods and technologies for supporting citizen curation of cultural heritage. Relevant outcomes of the Social Participation, Cohesion and Inclusion through Cultural Engagement (SPICE) project are presented, focusing on enhancing the state of content management and delivery strategies in museums and memory institutions. We argue that citizen curation requires a principled way of managing and integrating citizen responses, contributions and dataflows in the domain of cultural heritage, raising challenges and opportunities such as integration of distributed and diverse data sources, authoritativeness, interdependence, privacy, data reuse and rights management. The solution is a Linked Data Hub (LDH), which integrates museum collections and user-generated content and repurposes them to end-user systems tailored to specific use cases for citizens and museum practitioners. Such LDH must be non-open , by offering an approach that gives citizens and organisations, such as museums or engagement agencies, meaningful control over their data by implementing user-tailored policies and negotiated access and terms of use. Additionally, our solution addresses privacy violations in user-contributed content by offering a near-real-time content monitoring framework. We present the LDH discussing pilot applications within the EU-funded project SPICE, including ‘Deep Viewpoints’, which currently supports the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in citizen curation activities. Overall, this article serves as a critical milestone in closing functional gaps and advancing the state of technology in managing citizen responses and contributions in the cultural heritage domain.

SummaryThe Cultural Heritage domain is a global resource able to gain more and more importance and value because it becomes research field characterized by many aspects to be studied such as its enjoyment and promotion. In this paper, we present the design and the implementation of an intelligent Internet of Things (IoT) platform supporting the Cultural Heritage domain. In details, the objective of the proposed platform is to create intelligent solutions and services to enhance the visitors' interaction with cultural objects. To perform this research task, the platform relies on ubiquitous and IoT applications that can represent a suitable solution for improving visitors' experience when inside a museum or a temporary art exhibition. The IoT paradigm applied to the Cultural Heritage domain has the main purpose to transform a static cultural space into an intelligent environment enforcing a set of proximity‐based and multimedia services. To assess our methodology, we realize a real case study during an art event in Naples, Italy.

Open data is becoming increasingly popular in a wide range of service domains; however, most open datasets in Taiwan remain separate. The lack of linked open data (LOD) makes it difficult to locate and combine open datasets for the creation of innovative applications. In this study, we sought to facilitate the spread of open data in Taiwan using a novel approach referred to as define–produce–invoke (DPI). The proposed scheme employs a newly defined data query language, called LODQL (LOD query language), to allow the definition of rules for the generation of LOD by data experts. We also developed an LOD engine, which is able to produce linked open datasets and allow application developers to access LOD by invoking RESTful services. This scheme also allows data visualizations indicating the relevance of open datasets and the associations among open data items. Experiments demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed DPI approach.