Japan’s National Institute of Informatics (NII) is an academic research institution that aims to advance the creation of a state-of-the-art academic information infrastructure. Such infrastructure is essential to research and education within the broader academic community. With its extensive experience in Linked Data and other semantic technologies, Ontotext was able to provide invaluable support to NII in achieving its goals.
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, museum collections, ert..
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 effienctly use in their work;
- how to integrate natural language search and provide reliable SPARQL endpoint.
The Solution: 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 semantic database GrpahDB to store the datasets and to provide a backend to the public demo website.
Examples of LOD.AC Applications
Map Demo: integration of LODAC, DBPedia
Yokohama Art Spot
LODAC iOS Application
Why Choose Ontotext?
Powered by Ontotext’s semantic graph 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, species data, etc., but future plans of NII involve contributing more generic Linked Data (including Japanese contents such as dbpedia.jp).
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