Retrieving Structured Information from (Semi-)/(Un-)Structured Cultural Object Documentation

Abstract

In the course of developing facilities for integrating cultural heritage in the everyday education practice, highly structured information was retrieved from both the structured and the unstructured Europeana documentation contributed by the Greek cultural institutions (~480K entries); Modern Greek is the working language. Satisfactory results were obtained by using in-house developed medium sized Getty/AAT compatible vocabularies and simple heuristics. The paper reports on the development of controlled vocabularies and the retrieval of structured information from the unstructured Europeana documentation. Retrieval results show the importance of controlled vocabularies and thesauri as regards the exploitation of digital library content.