Distributed Semantic Content Creation and Publication for Cultural Heritage Legacy Systems
Kim Viljanen, Jouni Tuominen, Teppo Känsälä, Eero Hyvönen · 2008
Cultural heritage is by nature strongly interlinked, e.g. thematically and historically, but at the same time distributed in heterogeneous collections of different memory organizations at different locations. In order to provide the end-users with aggregated homogeneous views to distributed heterogeneous contents, semantic portals have been created successfully based on metadata and shared (or aligned) ontologies. This paper discusses two problems encountered in such a distributed semantic content creation environment. First, during the content creation work, how could a publisher start using shared ontologies in legacy cataloguing and annotation systems that do not support ontologies. Second, during content publication, how could a publisher re-use the aggregated content in its own legacy publication system, e.g., on the ordinary web pages of a museum or in a collection browser. As a solution, we present the ONKI Ontology Server for adding shared ontological annotation functionalities to legacy cataloguing systems in a practical, cost-efficient and lightweight way. For distributed publishing of the aggregated semantic portal services, we introduce the lightweight mash-up web widget components called “floatlets”. A major idea behind both the ONKI functionalities and floatlets is that they can be easily integrated with legacy systems on the user interface level, in the same spirit as e.g. Google Maps.