Semantic Web and Vocabulary Interoperability: an experiment with illumination collections

Résumé En

Semantic search across collections described with heterogeneous metadata is an important problem in the Cultural Heritage field. This paper presents an experiment on enhancing the semantic interoperability of two digital iconographic collections: Mandragore, the iconographic database of the Manuscript Department of the French National Library (BnF), and the Medieval Illuminated manuscripts collection of the National Library of the Netherlands (KB). While the content of these two collections is similar, they have been processed differently. The vocabularies used to index their objects are both controlled and hierarchically organized Knowledge Organization Systems (KOS), but they do not have the same semantics and structure. The experiment presented here started with a precise analysis of each of these vocabularies. Then, each of them was represented in a standard model. This model, namely, SKOS, paves the way for semantic reconciliation of heterogeneous KOSs, on top of the RDF Semantic Web data model. Once this step has been taken, it is possible to use simple automatic techniques for matching the concepts of the two vocabularies at the semantic level, based on their lexical similarities. Finally, a prototype was built that exploits the information contained in the vocabularies and in their alignment, to allow for searching documents in both collections at the same time, using a single set of descriptors as query terms.