Publishing Historical Texts on the Semantic Web - A Case Study

Abstract

Abstract-Historical texts are an important component of cultural heritage, and are being digitized and published on the web in various portals for the researchers and the public. However, searching and linking them with related contents is challenging due to the non-structured text form, digitization errors, and the differences and variations between old and modern language, including historical names (e.g. places), used for querying. This paper addresses these issues by presenting an approach and a system for publishing old texts on the semantic web. As a case study, an existing historical newspaper archive on the web is considered. In our model, semantic metadata is added to the text using automated concept extraction methods. Search is implemented with semantic techniques, by creating a multi-faceted search interface for the text materials. Problems due to OCR errors and spelling variants are addressed with a fuzzy string matching algorithm trying to guess corresponding words in a lexicon, and giving suggestions for corrected word forms. References between texts in the library as well as links between the library and external knowledge sources are formed by using shared ontologies for semantic annotations.

How to create and use a national cross-domain ontology and data infrastructure on the Semantic Web

“…The Semantic Web (SW) sees the Web as an interlinked collection of data (Web of Data) instead of only a space of interlinked hypertext documents, Web of Pages. The idea was proposed in the 90's by Tim Berners-Lee [4], and first recommendations for the SW, 1 such as the Resource Description Framework 2 (RDF), were developed before the millenium. The recommendations constitute the W3C "layer cake model" [9,13] on top of XML, the lingua franca of the WWW, and lay out a new basis of shared semantics for interoperability of data.…”

Linked Data and Cultural Heritage

“…Universities were the most highly represented organisation type in this study. Nine National GLAM organisations were involved in the collected studies: the Biblioteca Nacional de España [21], the British National Archives [22], the National Audiovisual Archive of Finland [23], the National Library of Finland [24], the National Library of Latvia [25], the Royal Library of Belgium, [26], Bibliotheque Nationale de France [27], the National Library of Israel [28], and the National Library of Ireland [29]. This was the second most frequently represented organisation type.…”

Searchable Turkish OCRed historical newspaper collection 1928–1942

“…Gatos et al [32] devised a segmentation-free algorithm by combining image preprocessing, segmentation, synthetic data creation, word spotting and user's feedback technologies to extract keywords from historical type-written documents. Ahonen and Hyvonen [33] composed a semantic search system for historical texts of the National Library of Finland using a common ontology where cultural objects were annotated semantically. In their work, a multi-faceted semantic search interface was applied to the annotated material.…”