E-Heritageand the VU Semantic Web group

Guus SchreiberComputer Science

VU University Amsterdam

Semantic Web @ VU Amsterdam

• 40 people, two groups: Web & Media (Schreiber), Knowledge Representation & Reasoning (van Harmelen)

• A few ongoing projects:– europeana.eu: EU culture portal

– NL projects on access to cultural heritage: CHIP, Agora

– EU NoTube: Web & TV semantic integration

– PrestoPrime: user-generated annotations and content for TV archives

– EU LarKC: platform for massive distributed incomplete reasoning

Characteristics of the Web

• AAA: Anyone can say Anything about Any Topic

• The Web is an open world• It is impossible to enforce unique names• The networl effect: a virtuous circle

The Web: resources and links

URL URL

Web link

The Semantic Web: typed resources and links

URL URL

Web link

ULAN

Henri Matisse

Dublin Core

creator

Painting“Woman with hat

SFMOMA

The myth of a unified vocabulary

• In large virtual collections there are always multiple vocabularies – In multiple languages

• Every vocabulary has its own perspective– You can’t just merge them

• But you can use vocabularies jointly by defining a limited set of links– “Vocabulary alignment”

• It is surprising what you can do with just a few links

Exempel use of vocabulary alignment

“Tokugawa”

SVCN period Edo

SVCN is local in-house ethnology thesaurus

AAT style/period Edo (Japanese period) Tokugawa

AAT is Getty’s Art & Architecture Thesaurus

Architecture of a Semantic Web application

Web pages, databasescollections, tables,

convertersscrapers

RDF store

RDF files

RDF query & inferencing

Application

Demo using linked data (RPI, Hendler)

http://e-culture.multimedian.nl/demo/search

Search: WordNet patterns that increase recall without sacrificing precisions

Enriching the metadata

Resulting semantic annotation

Learning vocabulary alignments

• Example: learning relations between art styles in AAT and artists in ULAN through NLP of art historic texts– “Who are Impressionist painters?”

Personalized Rijksmuseum

• Interactive user modeling

•Recommendations of artworks and art topics

Mobile museum tour

Video tagging games