Syrtis: New Perspectives for Semantic Web Adoption

International audienceThe last two decades have shown a huge interest in using Semantic Web technologies in Cultural Institutions. There are now a large number of Open Data projects such as Europeana, which aggregates millions of records, allowing us to find many relevant information. However, most of the effort to adopt Semantic Web principles has been spent in national libraries or at larger scope and most local libraries still store isolated data. Cultural information held in these local institutions is generally not available outside the library due to old-fashioned Integrated Library Systems (ILS). We advocate that improvements have to be done in the transformation and enrichment of the catalogs of any cultural institution to enhance the accessibility of data. The Syrtis project lies at the heart of the cultural heritage challenges and aims at providing relevant solutions for guiding librarians through the adoption of Semantic Web concepts. This paper presents an overview of the architecture built for the management of cultural records in the context of the Syrtis project. We also discuss briefly the current challenges faced by the project