Calling It What It Is. Thesauri in the Flanders Heritage Agency: History, Importance, Use and Technological Advances

Abstract

Heritage organizations in Flanders started using thesauri fairly recently compared to other countries. This paper starts with examining the historical use of thesauri and controlled vocabularies in computer systems by the Flemish Government dealing with immovable cultural heritage. Their evolution from simple, flat, controlled lists to actual thesauri with scope notes, hierarchical and equivalence relations and links to other thesauri will be discussed. An explanation will be provided for the evolution in our approach to controlled vocabularies, and how they radically changed querying and the way data is indexed in our systems.<br><br> Technical challenges inherent to complex thesauri and how to overcome them will be outlined. These issues being solved, thesauri have become an essential feature of the Flanders Heritage inventory management system. The number of vocabularies rose over the years and became an essential tool for integrating heritage from different disciplines.<br><br> As a final improvement, thesauri went from being a core part of one application (the inventory management system) to forming an essential part of a new general resource oriented system architecture for Flanders Heritage influenced by Linked Data. For this purpose, a generic SKOS based editor was created. Due to the SKOS model being generic enough to be used outside of Flanders Heritage, the decision was made early on to develop this editor as an open source project called Atramhasis and share it with the larger heritage world.

Atramhasis: An online SKOS vocabulary editor

“…All mapping to RDF and SKOS is done behind the scenes, invisible to the editors. The system was conceived as Flanders Heritage's central platform for publication of internal and regional vocabularies dealing with cultural heritage (Mortier et al, 2017). The publication website allows humans to browse, search, and consult the vocabularies online in a user-friendly way.…”

Digital Archiving of Archaeological Resources in Flanders (Belgium): a brief review

“…They feature links to other metadata such as the Flemish Central Address Database (Buyle et al 2019) and ISO country codes (I3). The controlled vocabularies used in Archaeoportal, like most vocabularies used by Flanders Heritage, are published as SKOS-data (Mortier et al 2017) at the Flanders Heritage Thesaurus (I2). However, while the metadata are available as regular JSON, they are not elevated to JSON-LD or backed by a formal RDF ontology, so adherence to subprinciple I1 can be seen as partial.…”

One Archaeology: A Manifesto for the Systematic and Effective Use of Mapped Data from Archaeological Fieldwork and Research

“…Formalised vocabularies, or thesauri, are now in common usage in archaeological inventories. They provide a structure to the data and encourage a uniform use of vocabularies to improve querying and information retrieval [96]. Originally developed for internal databases, many organisations have now published their key vocabularies online in SKOS Linked Data formats.…”