Towards a Vocabulary to Implement Culturally Relevant Relationships Between Digital Collections in Heritage Institutions

Abstract

Cultural heritage institutions are publishing their digital collections over the web as LOD. This is is a new step in the patrimonialization and curatorial processes developed by such institutions. Many of these collections are thematically superimposed and complementary. Frequently, objects in these collections present culturally relevant relationships, such as a book about a painting, or a draft or sketch of a famous painting, etc. LOD technology enables such heritage records to be interlinked, achieving interoperability and adding value to digital collections, thus empowering heritage institutions. An aim of this research is characterizing such culturally relevant relationships and organizing them in a vocabulary. Use cases or examples of relationships between objects suggested by curators or mentioned in literature and in the conceptual models as FRBR/LRM, CIDOC CRM and RiC-CM, were collected and used as examples or inspiration of cultural relevant relationships. Relationships identified are collated and compared for identifying those with the same or similar meaning, synthesized and normalized. A set of thirty-three culturally relevant relationships are identified and formalized as a LOD property vocabulary to be used by digital curators to interlink digital collections. The results presented are provisional and a starting point to be discussed, tested, and enhanced.