Abstract
Within the field of Digital Humanities, a great effort has been made to digitize documents and collections in order to build catalogs and exhibitions on the Web. In this paper, we present WeME, a Web application for building a knowledge base, which can be used to describe digital documents. WeME can be used by different categories of users: archivists/librarians and scholars. WeME extracts information from some well-known Linked Data nodes, i.e. DBpedia and GeoNames, as well as traditional Web sources, i.e. VIAF. As a use case of WeME, we describe the knowledge base related to the Christopher Clavius’s corre spondence. Clavius was a mathematician and an astronomer of the XVI Century. He wrote more than 300 letters, most of which are owned by the Historical Archives of the Pontifical Gregorian University (APUG) in Rome. The built knowledge base contains 139 links to DBpedia, 83 links to GeoNames and 129 links to VIAF. In order to test the usability of WeME, we invited 26 users to test the application.
Highlights
Over the last years, a great effort has been made in the field of Digital Humanities to digitize documents and collections in different formats, such as PDF, XML, plain texts and images
Projects are developed to annotate a subset of texts and images, such as the Clavius on The Web project** [1, 2] where the idea behind the work presented in this paper originated
In this paper we present the Web Metadata Editor (WeME), a Web application which provides users with a userfriendly interface to build a knowledge base associated with a collection
Summary
A great effort has been made in the field of Digital Humanities to digitize documents and collections in different formats, such as PDF, XML, plain texts and images. Most of the existing tools for catalog creation allow you to build the knowledge base manually, in the sense that the user must insert each piece of information (metadata) one by one. This process is repetitive, because many documents are written by the same author and in the same place requiring to write the same information twice or more In general this manual effort produces three main disadvantages: a) the probability of introducing errors increases, b) the whole process is slowed down because it is not automatic, c) inserted information is isolated, i.e. not connected to the rest of the Web. Involving users as co-creators of metadata could be a possible solution to the described problems [3].
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