The Semantic Enrichment Strategy for Types, Chronologies and Historical Periods in Searchculture.gr

Abstract

Most aggregators face challenges regarding searchability, discoverability and visual presentation of their content due to metadata heterogeneity. We developed an innovative metadata enrichment and homogenization scheme that is both effective and user-friendly and we embedded it in the ingestion workflow of searchculture.gr, the cultural heritage aggregator of National Documentation Centre (EKT). Two key components of the enrichment scheme are semantics.gr, a platform for publishing vocabularies that contains a tool for massive semantic enrichment, and a parametric tool embedded in the aggregator for chronological normalization. We enriched and homogenized the aggregated content with respect to types and chronological information which subsequently allowed us to develop advanced multilingual search and browsing features, including hierarchical navigation on types and historical periods, searching and faceting on type, time span and historical period, a tag cloud of types and an interactive timeline.