Contents:
- 1. Semantic Web
- 2. Contextualisation of Contemporary Art
- 3. SKOS
- 4. DCA SKOS vocabulary
- 5. Bibliography
- Appendix: Milestone deliverable: LOD made practical
This deliverable from the Digitsing Contemporary Art (DCA) project describes how to apply semantic web technologies in order to contextualise and enrich the information in contemporary art descriptions. It begins by introducing data descriptions using RDF and URIs ; adding semantics using RDFS and OWL; querying RDF using SPARQL; and publishing RDF as Linked Open Data (LOD). It then goes on to provide best practices for creating a data model, data descriptions and how to enrich the data further by linking it with external data sources. It emphasizes the use of controlled vocabularies for contextualisation, giving special attention to SKOS. The last chapter applies its best practices to the DCA vocabulary in order to support multi-lingual search in Europeana. The appendix was an internal deliverable that has now been made public via this deliverable and describes how publish the data as Linked Open Data in practice.
This deliverable is primarily an introduction to semantic web technology and linked open data, using contemporary art examples to demonstrate this type of technology. It is relevant for those responsible for the implementation of such technology as well as creators of data models and ontologies and reading it will be easier for those with some background on the subject. It heavily stresses the use of existing standard ontologies, models and vocabularies while acknowledging the need to use local extensions to such standards. Particularly helpful is the identification and description of existing standards (models, ontologies) for consideration.