Mismuseos.net: Art After Technology (putting cultural data to work)
MISMUSEOS.NET MONTREAL CANADÁ.
LAM: Libraries, Archives and Museums are the places of our collective memory.
LOD: They contain a hidden graph, made up of nodes (entities) and lines (relations) with enormous possibilities of discovering and knowledge.
SEMANTIC WEB: Now we can compute those concealed relationships, and expose the connexions inside our collective memory graph under some conditions.
DESCRIPTION OF THE PROBLEM
The data of the museums are distributed and not connected. There are more than 55,000 museums in 202 countries. We cannot do interesting exploitations using the capacity of the machines with the information contained in the current formats of knowledge representation
So, the first part of the problem consists of building a Museums Micro Cloud of Linked, Clean and Curated Data with an underlying Specialized and Unified Graph
Secondly, we wanted to connect cultural and educational worlds in a knowledge ecosystem. In other words, we wanted to valorise cultural information of our cultural heritage for educational purposes.
Our project shows the way for overcoming the challenge of linking all the resources of all museums, by making real that possibility for a group of Spanish Greatest Museums.
The project is a free access online solution available in the web address http://mismuseos.net.
MisMuseos.net, gathers museum metadata from multiple Spanish Public Institutions. It is a semantic Museum of Museums.
It works according to the standards of the Semantic Web and the principles of the Linked Open Data Web.
We currently have a collection of seven Spanish Great Museums (a meta-museum), where users can browse over 17,000 pieces of art and 2,650 artists.
Mismuseos.net allows users to find and discover museums-related content, and also reach some related external information thanks to the correlation with other datasets.
The main goal of Mismuseos.net is to present a case of exploitation of Linked Data for the G.L.A.M. community through innovative end-user applications, like facet-based searches and semantic context creation, which drastically improve user experience, built on GNOSS, a semantic and social software platform with a deep focus on the generation of social knowledge ecosystems and end-user applications in a Linked Data environment.
In more detail, the project is guided by the following goals:
- To put data to work: exploit public datasets and information on museums to generate benefits for users and improve the user’s experience.
- To link datasets both to enrich content and generate accurate contexts of information
- To clean up, curate, unify, extend and hybridize data into a knowledge domain.
- To express all the data through a unique graph in the context of a specialized Micro Linked Data Cloud for culture and education.
- To connect cultural and educational worlds in a knowledge ecosystem through the development of Hybrid or Extended Ontologies thought for that purpose.
- Europeana dataset (CER.ES collection) and the online collections of public Spanish Museums.
- DBPedia, used to supplement the information about the author and extract information on authors and museums location.
- Geonames, in order to obtain the geolocation data of artists and museums, once we have obtained the names of the places from the primary source or from Dbpedia. This information will be consumed in the future to locate them in a map view.
- Didactalia, an index of over 50,000 educational resources on gnoss.com, linked to provide users with related educational content.
TECHNOLOGY AND MAIN FEATURES:
The solution has been developed on gnoss.com
The featured applications in Mismuseos.net are:
- Faceted Searches: The search engine enables aggregated searches by different facets and summarization of results for each successive search.
- Contexts or related information: enriched content and navigation through graphs. We have set several contexts depending on the object or entity that the user is viewing, which offer dynamically generated content:
1. Contexts for the entity ‘piece of art’
2. Contexts for the entity ‘artist’
- Semantic Content Management System (SemCMS): The previous entities (pieces of art, artists and museums) are represented on the platform with their specific ontologies thanks to the Semantic Content Management System which allows uploading an OWL file describing the concepts and relations within a particular knowledge domain, and it generates a semantic form with all the classes and properties represented in the OWL file.
- Expand the collections with more museums and galleries
- Enable the multilingual navigation in Mismuseos.net and, as a consequence, extending the cultural domains of the solution.
- Show the results of a query in very specialized ways (Now, we can in some cases search on a map, but in the future it should be arranged to do that on timelines and other ways of presentation). The connection between specialized fields of knowledge has not only an ontological solution, but also a solution based on the way the results are shown.
HOW OUR INNOVATIVE IDEAS WILL ADVANCE THE GLAM COMMUNITY
Direct advances/ benefits:
- Extending the cultural graph with additional contexts through the connection to other cultural heritage resources of libraries and archives
- Offering a semantic web publishing service for museums to serve customized semantic webpages with selected data coming from Mismuseos.net.
- Providing the point of view from the educational world to reflect on the necessary research on ontological engineering in LAM.
- Providing linked data or semantic contexts to third parties, putting your cultural information inside new platforms and spaces
Other potential advances:
- Developing personalized cultural assistants depending on the user preferences
- Offering varied levels of specialized information using different views and searching tools for every kind of user, from kids to researchers
- Promoting the development of new applications for your exposed linked data, from games to digital books
The main problems we have faced in this project have been:
- Generating a scalable graph that can potentially integrate any Museum
- Maintaining the datasets and data contained in them
- Developing uses and presentations of those data appropriate to each environment or user group (Semantic Dynamic Publishing)
We think we have shown a possible way to travel and solve this set of problems