The amount of digital cultural heritage data produced by cultural heritage institutions is growing rapidly. Digital cultural heritage repositories have therefore become an efficient and effective way to disseminate and exploit digital cultural heritage data. However, many digital cultural heritage repositories worldwide share technical challenges such as data integration and interoperability among national and regional digital cultural heritage repositories. The result is dispersed and poorly-linked cultured heritage data, backed by non-standardized search interfaces, which thwart users’ attempts to contextualize information from distributed repositories. A recently introduced geospatial semantic web is being adopted by a great many new and existing digital cultural heritage repositories to overcome these challenges. However, no one has yet conducted a conceptual survey of the geospatial semantic web concepts for a cultural heritage audience. A conceptual survey of these concepts pertinent to the cultural heritage field is, therefore, needed. Such a survey equips cultural heritage professionals and practitioners with an overview of all the necessary tools, and free and open source semantic web and geospatial semantic web platforms that can be used to implement geospatial semantic web-based cultural heritage repositories. Hence, this article surveys the state-of-the-art geospatial semantic web concepts, which are pertinent to the cultural heritage field. It then proposes a framework to turn geospatial cultural heritage data into machine-readable and processable resource description framework (RDF) data to use in the geospatial semantic web, with a case study to demonstrate its applicability. Furthermore, it outlines key free and open source semantic web and geospatial semantic platforms for cultural heritage institutions. In addition, it examines leading cultural heritage projects employing the geospatial semantic web. Finally, the article discusses attributes of the geospatial semantic web that require more attention, that can result in generating new ideas and research questions for both the geospatial semantic web and cultural heritage fields.
In recent years, considerable efforts have been made by cultural heritage institutions across the globe to digitise cultural heritage sites, artifacts, historical maps, etc. for digital preservation and online representation. On the other hand, ample research projects and studies have been published that demonstrate the great capabilities of web-geographic information systems (web-GIS) for the dissemination and online representation of cultural heritage data. However, cultural heritage data and the associated metadata produced by many cultural heritage institutions are heterogeneous. To make this heterogeneous data more interoperable and structured, an ever-growing number of cultural heritage institutions are adopting linked data principles. Although the cultural heritage domain has already started implementing linked open data concepts to the cultural heritage data, there are not many research articles that present an easy-to-implement, free, and open-source-based web-GIS architecture that integrates 3D digital cultural heritage models with cloud computing and linked open data. Furthermore, the integration of web-GIS technologies with 3D web-based visualisation and linked open data may offer new dimensions of interaction and exploration of digital cultural heritage. To demonstrate the high potential of integration of these technologies, this study presents a novel cloud architecture that attempts to enhance digital cultural heritage exploration by integrating 3D digital cultural heritage models with linked open data from DBpedia and GeoNames platforms using web-GIS technologies. More specifically, a digital interactive map, 3D digital cultural heritage models, and linked open data from DBpedia and GeoNames platforms were integrated into a cloud-based web-GIS architecture. Thus, the users of the architecture can easily interact with the digital map, visualise 3D digital cultural heritage models, and explore linked open data from GeoNames and DBpedia platforms, which offer additional information and context related to the selected cultural heritage site as well as external web resources. The architecture was validated by applying it to specific case studies of Australian cultural heritage and seeking expert feedback on the system, its benefits, and scope for improvement in the near future.
Recently, many Resource Description Framework (RDF) data generation tools have been developed to convert geospatial and non-geospatial data into RDF data. Furthermore, there are several interlinking frameworks that find semantically equivalent geospatial resources in related RDF data sources. However, many existing Linked Open Data sources are currently sparsely interlinked. Also, many RDF generation and interlinking frameworks require a solid knowledge of Semantic Web and Geospatial Semantic Web concepts to successfully deploy them. This article comparatively evaluates features and functionality of the current state-of-the-art geospatial RDF generation tools and interlinking frameworks. This evaluation is specifically performed for cultural heritage researchers and professionals who have limited expertise in computer programming. Hence, a set of criteria has been defined to facilitate the selection of tools and frameworks. In addition, the article provides a methodology to generate geospatial cultural heritage RDF data and to interlink it with the related RDF data. This methodology uses a CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) ontology and interlinks the RDF data with DBpedia. Although this methodology has been developed for cultural heritage researchers and professionals, it may also be used by other domain professionals.
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