Web Reasoning for Cultural Heritage

Cultural Heritage is the focus of a great and continually increasing number of R&D initiatives, aiming at efficiently managing and disseminating cultural resources on the Web. As more institutions make their collections available online and proceed to aggregate them in domain repositories, knowledge-based management and retrieval becomes a necessary evolution from simple syntactic data exchange. In the process of aggregating heterogeneous resources and publishing them for retrieval and creative reuse, networks such as Europeana and DPLA invest in technologies that achieve semantic data integration. The resulting repositories join the Linked Open Data cloud, allowing to link cultural heritage domain knowledge to existing datasets. Integration of diverse information is achieved through the use of formal ontologies, enabling reasoning services to offer powerful semantic search and navigation mechanisms.