The linked data ecosystem for SSH and a case study from the cultural heritage domain

Semantic Web, an extension of the current web, focuses on the structure of data. The aim is to develop data structures that will be more effectively processable by computers, in contrast to the limited functionality of the contemporary scriptocentric web. Semantic Web, therefore, aims to transform the web into a global ‘database’ and lead the developments toward the Web of Data. The specifications developed or related to this aim, as well as the processes and rules for achieving it, are known as Linked Data, i.e. (inter)connected data from different sources. Linked Data creates a content-agnostic, as well as software-agnostic ecosystem, which can be used for encoding and publishing all types of information from various domains. The first presentation of this webinar introduces the basic concepts of Linked Data and shows that Linked Data are particularly suitable for Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH) since they do not emphasize metrics and quantifications but conceptualizations and reason. After presenting the paradigm shift introduced by linked data concerning the development of the web, a case study from the cultural heritage domain will be discussed. The second presentation showcases SearchCulture.gr, the Greek cross-domain Cultural Data Aggregator, as a state-of-the-art case, for the use of Linked data in the cultural domain. The National Documentation Centre of Greece (EKT) develops this service, which has collected a growing number of 800.000 digitized Cultural Heritage Objects (CHOs) from 73 cultural institutions. Moreover, it is the Accredited National Aggregator for Europeana having provided more than 580.000 CHOs so far. Addressing metadata heterogeneity has been a key target from the start. Controlled Linked Data vocabularies for item types, historical periods, subjects and persons have been developed over the course of the past years and are being used for the semantic enrichment of the CHOs’ metadata. This presentation addresses the challenges, methodology and tools used over the past 7 years for the process of enriching the aggregated CHOs’ metadata. This process classifies and disambiguates the aggregated data, provides multilinguality and adds significant browse and search functionalities to the portal and, therefore, opens new horizons for SSH research