- Improved services by aggregating information from all museums in Japan
- Increased efficiency
- Enhanced user experience by providing natural language search
The Goal
Japan’s National Institute of Informatics (NII) wanted to use a Linked Data approach to make available various types of academic information such as cultural heritage and museum collections. NII is an academic research institution that aims to advance the creation of a state-of-the-art academic information infrastructure, which is essential to research and education within the broader academic community.
The Challenge
Some of the main challenges for the project were:
- How to aggregate cultural heritage and museum information from all museums in Japan
- How to model it and present it on a website for researchers and other audiences to efficiently use in their work
- How to integrate natural language search and provide reliable SPARQL endpoint
The Solution: Multiple LOD Applications Powered by GraphDB
The LOD.AC project scraped the data already digitized by many Japanese museums and mapped it to RDF in CIDOC CRM. As a result, all that knowledge became accessible as interlinked data and was presented as integrated data views. The Linked Data approach empowered the release of useful academic information resources in Japan such as, for example, the relationships between associated artists and artworks from different museum collections. The result is LOD.AC Museum, which covers a web presentation, natural language search, and SPARQL endpoint. The project uses Ontotext’s leading RDF database GraphDB to store the datasets and to provide a backend to the public demo website.
Examples of LOD.AC Applications
Business Benefits
- Ability to aggregate information from all museums in Japan
- Efficient consumption of this information by all types of users
- Ease of use by providing natural language search
Why Choose Ontotext?
With its extensive experience in Linked Data and other semantic technologies, Ontotext was able to provide invaluable support to NII in achieving its goals. Powered by Ontotext’s RDF database, LOD.AC Museum is now able to release useful academic information and create applications that use it. Currently, the data released through the project focuses on domestic information resources such as museums and museum data and species data, but NII plans to contribute more generic Linked Data (including Japanese content such as dbpedia.jp).
