A Survey of Geospatial Semantic Web for Cultural Heritage

Abstract

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.

A Comparative Evaluation of Geospatial Semantic Web Frameworks for Cultural Heritage

“…Furthermore, there are some other technical challenges such as representing raster data in an RDF data model as well as querying raster RDF data, 3D RDF data representation and query, storing, and representing big geospatial RDF data, among others. For a more detailed discussion on the above-mentioned concepts, we recommend referring to our previous research article [24].…”

A Web GIS-Based Integration of 3D Digital Models with Linked Open Data for Cultural Heritage Exploration

“…However, at the time this article was written, the GeoNames platform also provided information about places in the linked-open-data-compatible format of RDF. Interested readers who would like to know more about the semantic web, ontologies, and the geospatial semantic web concepts pertinent to the cultural heritage field may refer to the previous work of the authors [20].…”

Semantic Integration of Raster Data for Earth Observation: An RDF Dataset of Territorial Unit Versions with their Land Cover

“…To do so, they polygonize the desired region of the raster. This workaround is arguably not a complete solution to represent raster files in RDF as the original geometric source of the data is not preserved [21]. In our approach, the areas of interest are predefined, hence the geometries (polygons) are known.…”