Review of the
Knowledge Organization and Cultural Heritage:
Perspectives of the Semantic Web conference held at the Academia Sinica Center for Digital Cultures in Taipei
on June 2, 2016 and a special journal issue of academic papers related to the
conference. Speakers came from mainland China and Taiwan across the Taiwan
Strait, as well as the United States. Topics included methods and theories of
Linked Open Data (LOD), the modeling of ontologies and knowledge bases, the
historical and structural review of knowledge organization and representation,
practical approaches used in exploring cultural assets, and the efforts of
standards development for preservation and management of digital data. Speakers
were encouraged to submit full papers to the peer-reviewed Journal of Library and Information Science (ISSN 0363-3640). These
led to the publication of a whole special issue of the journal (vol. 43/no.1) in
April 2017.
Review of the
Knowledge Organization and Cultural Heritage:
Perspectives of the Semantic Web conference held at the Academia Sinica Center for Digital Cultures in Taipei
on June 2, 2016 and a special journal issue of academic papers related to the
conference.
Recently, Digital Humanities have garnered much attention all over the world. Concrete
results have been produced by the collaboration between humanistic studies and the
interdisciplinary research of semantic technology and information science. Most of
these studies rely on the deep excavation of cultural assets, and the complete
reorganization and cross-border interlinking of information resources held by
libraries, archives, museums (LAMs), digital centers, data repositories, and
more.
In this rapidly evolving field of cross-disciplinary studies, two imperatives have
emerged that require further research and discussion: (1) How to construct Knowledge
Organization Systems (KOS) following current Semantic Web standards and best
practice guidelines? This involves combining various methods applicable to digital
humanities, and conducting studies aiming to promote, utilize, and preserve cultural
heritages along with the digital datasets based on and created for them; (2) How can
we structure and express the data in the digital assets so they can be handled and
understood by both ordinary users and machines? This question is raised because the
creation, linking, enhancing, and reusing of a semantic-rich dataset depends on the
usability, flexibility, and reliability of its knowledge organization structure and
encoding schema.
To explore in greater depth these two essential needs which have come to light in the
field in recent years, the
Academia Sinica Center for Digital
Cultures organized the Knowledge Organization and
Cultural Heritage: Perspectives of the Semantic Web conference on June
2, 2016 in Taipei . Speakers came from mainland China and
Taiwan across the Taiwan Strait, as well as the United States. Topics included
methods and theories of Linked Open Data (LOD), the modeling of ontologies and
knowledge bases, the historical and structural review of knowledge organization and
representation, practical approaches used in exploring cultural assets, and the
efforts of standards development for preservation and management of digital data.
All topics were presented from different perspectives and were extremely well
received by the attendees. As a result, after the conference, speakers were
encouraged to submit full papers to the peer-reviewed Journal
of Library and Information Science (ISSN 0363-3640). These papers led to
the publication of a whole special issue of the journal (vol. 43/no.1) in April 2017
. Each full article (in Chinese) includes a long
English abstract, and all are openly available on the Web from the journal’s website
at [http://jlis.glis.ntnu.edu.tw/ojs/index.php/jlis/issue/view/89](http://jlis.glis.ntnu.edu.tw/ojs/index.php/jlis/issue/view/89).
The nine papers presented in this special issue of the
Journal
of Library and Information Science put forward answers to the
aforementioned challenges that LAMs and other cultural heritage organizations
encounter. The reported solutions utilized semantic technologies in conjunction with
knowledge organization methods in order to progress from digitization to
datafication. Datafication is critical because it makes possible production of data
that is not just machine-readable but truly machine-understandable, -processable,
and -actionable. While these are challenging topics, they hold the most up-to-date
concepts and breakthroughs of interest to humanities researchers, information
scientists, and Sematic Web developers, in addition to practical answers for the
pressing needs of LAMs, digital centers, and repositories. The papers are presented
in four broad areas:
- To address the problem of reusability of structured data, the paper titled
Reuse of Structured Data: Semantics, Linkage, and
Realization by researchers from the Institute of Information Science
at Academia Sinica, Taiwan (Huang, Lee, and Chuang) presents in detail the five
cross-domain knowledge bases and seven special domain knowledge bases
currently using LOD approaches. The paper further reports the results of data
quality analysis and the relations between metadata and data provenance,
providing a lightweight ontology voc4odw for describing data reuse and
provenance. The website data.odw.tw stores and converts the collection of
metadata into semantically-structured linked data, reflecting the steps taken
from original cataloging data to semantic linked data segmentation.
- Knowledge organization structures and semantic models are used in cultural
asset preservation, management, research utilization, and practical
applications. With the purpose of understanding the current development and
application of knowledge organizations, this special journal issue included four
articles demonstrating the recent developments and applications of knowledge
organization systems (KOS).
- Cuijuan Xia’s Building a Digital Humanities
Platform by Using Linked Open Data Services describes how
the Shanghai library has used LOD on a large scale. Through reforming
the traditional methods of digital resource collections, the team
established a series of independent yet interlinked knowledge bases. The
design process and the methods for fully integrating heterogeneous
literature resources to form the two literature knowledge bases (Sheng Xuanhuai Archives Knowledge Base of Shanghai
Library and Genealogy Knowledge Service
Platform of Shanghai Library) are explained thoroughly,
demonstrating the new role and innovative usage of historical archives
in the Semantic Web era.
- A Study of Linked Data for Digital Collections: A
Case of the Painter Chen Cheng-Po by Shu-Jiun Chen from
Academia Sinica, focuses on digital collections, particularly
person-centered digitized materials. The project aims at presenting a
more flexible search function and enabling exploration in the context of
a group of human characters centered around the artist Chen Cheng-Po,
responding to complex questions based on semantically modeled and
visualized relationship networks. The exemplary contribution of this
research lies in the research method, which allows machines to handle
and understand large amounts of digital humanities resources. As a
result, the research datasets can be easily used by users and
re-organized when building their own new research, thus enhancing the
effectiveness of data use.
- Authors from Wuhan University and Dunhuang Research Institute (Wang,
Liu, and Xia) presented Design and Implementation
of Deep Semantic Indexing on Digital Cultural Heritage
Images. Using one of the Dunhuang cave’s
Nine-Colored Deer paintings as an experiment,
the paper expresses the deep image indexing method through analyzing
semantic features and themes of the images. It also reviews existing
metadata schemes and ontologies for cultural heritage objects.
Established on the concept of deep semantic indexing and its basic
requirements, a workflow was designed and three semantic indexing models
were constructed: the macroscopic concept model, information hierarchy
model, and structured image annotation model. This kind of deep semantic
indexing theory and the application of image information organization
theory are of great significance to the development of image information
organization methodology and digital humanistic research.
- Using ontological and Linked Data approaches, Fu and Ke’s Ontology-Based System for Librarianship Development -
A Case Study of Professor Chen-Ku Wang designs a knowledge
ontology through analyzing Professor Chen-Ku Wang’s lifelong academic
achievements and contributions. The ontology was used to describe his
scholarly history. The aim of the research was to build a website
describing the history of scholars in the field of library and
information science in Taiwan. In addition to browsing, searching, and
linking functions, a user can also access or download the ontology and
knowledge base content through SPARQL queries, allowing the website to
become a provider of Linked Data. The paper provides the results of the
website’s efficiency test analysis.
- Knowledge organization and standardized value vocabularies are closely
related. How can libraries (which have a tradition of implementing knowledge
organization systems) keep up with the 21st century Web, especially embracing
the wave of new ontology development? Three papers in this special issue
reported national-level efforts on the development of classification, thesauri,
and metadata standards demonstrating how this can be done.
- First, Wei Fan’s article, Towards Open, Semantic,
and Linked Chinese Classified
Thesaurus presents the development of the Chinese Classified Thesaurus (CCT) seen from
three milestones: open, semantic, and linked. The development stages of
CCT since 1994, as well as the research and practice of advanced
information retrieval languages are fully explained in the context of
knowledge organization in the field. It concluded that the Semantic Web
presents new opportunities for libraries and information
organizations.
- The needs for knowledge organization at the Internet age are apparent
and beyond the scope of library collections and published literature.
Cultural heritage institutions and museums heading towards digitization
have become the new norm. However, in terms of information standards for
cultural heritage assets, new norms are not yet established. Methodology for the Faceted
Thesaurus of Chinese Cultural Heritage: An Initial
Discussion by Ming-Yu Huang from University of Science
& Technology Beijing, uses China’s Faceted
Thesaurus of Chinese Cultural Heritage (FTCCH) and the USA
Getty Research Institute (GRI)’s Art &
Architecture Thesaurus as a base, detailing the background
and process of FTCCH, aiming at developing the concepts and vocabularies
for Chinese cultural heritages in this needed thesaurus. The results at
the current stage attempt to establish preliminary methodology and the
initial structure of FTCCH which led to a significant product of the
FTCCH.
- Related to FTCCH’s development and implementation, Peking University’s
Long Xiao et. al. shared A Cross-disciplinary and
Fundamental Study of Digital Humanities: Taking
Metadata
Standards for Digital Cultural Heritage Data
as an
Example. The article introduces a metadata standard for
digitized cultural heritage data usage in China. A metadata standard has
been developed through investigation and analysis, field research,
general framework modeling, standardized designs, and other steps. As a
component fitting in the overall structure of the Digital Preservation of Cultural Heritage project in China,
the paper clarifies the necessity and function of a standard norm, while
exploring how humanities and technology should cooperate and grow
together.
- All the latest developments in the digital age and knowledge organization
require a theoretical perspective to aid in understanding. Thus, the last paper
in this issue is Mei Mei Wu’s Some Thoughts on Knowledge
Organization in the Web Era, which posits that in the pre-Internet
paper age, a single informational item is like an isolated island in terms of
knowledge organization, whereas in the Internet age there is a drastic change.
Traditional methods of identification and searching are replaced by linked and
multi-oriented methods which allow clues and knowledge to be reconstructed,
organized, and interpreted to generate new knowledge. In this Internet age,
knowledge organization contributes to how humans comprehend knowledge. The paper
further proposes a kind of education for future knowledge organization
professionals.
In conclusion, this journal issue gathers the latest research developments of Taiwan
and Mainland China across the Taiwan Strait, exploring multiple aspects via
collective efforts, studies, and examples. The conference and this special issue
intend to facilitate cross-disciplinary research and discussion between knowledge
organization professionals and Semantic Web developers, as well as to contribute to
the growing body of digital humanities research by sharing experiences and promoting
interdisciplinary communication. The current role and function of knowledge
organization is revisited, and implementation requirements articulated. As
demonstrated by the contributors of this conference and special journal issue, for
those researchers in need of historical data, the information resources provided by
LAMs and digital centers have extraordinary value. Knowledge organization theories,
models, systems, and practical approaches are fundamentals to: enabling the deep
excavation of cultural assets, transforming semi-structured and unstructured data
into structured and machine-processable data, contextualizing and linking of
existing structured data across data silos, and enabling one-to-many usages of LAM
data in supporting digital humanities.
This collection of papers from many experts came from different perspectives, but the
central idea embodied is clear: from the Semantic Web perspective, knowledge
organization systems and knowledge organization methods are in the midst of a
paradigm shift. Opportunities brought by semantic technologies are driving us to
redefine the definition of knowledge organization, encouraging us to re-examine the
changes, potentials, and breakthroughs in information science.
Academia Sinica Center for Digital
Cultures (ASCDC). Knowledge Organization and Cultural
Heritage: Perspectives of the Semantic Web. 2017: [http://seminar2016-semanticweb.ascdc.tw/index.html](http://seminar2016-semanticweb.ascdc.tw/index.html) [Accessed 20
February 2018].
Zeng, Marcia Lei, and Shu-Jiun
Chen (Eds.). Special Issue,
Journal of Library and Information Science圖書館學與資訊科學 (ISSN 0363-3640) 43.1 (April 2017): [http://jlis.glis.ntnu.edu.tw/ojs/index.php/jlis/issue/view/89](http://jlis.glis.ntnu.edu.tw/ojs/index.php/jlis/issue/view/89)
[Accessed 20 February 2018].