Instance-based Semantic Interoperability in the Cultural Heritage

This paper gives a comprehensive overview over the problem of Semantic Interoperability in the Cultural Heritage domain, with a particular focus on solutions centered around extensional, i.e., instance-based, ontology matching methods. It presents three typical scenarios requiring interoperability, one with homogeneous collections, one with heterogeneous collections, and one with multi-lingual collections. It discusses two different ways to evaluate potential alignments, one based on the application of re-indexing, one using a reference alignment. To these scenarios we apply extensional matching with different similarity measures, which gives interesting insight into the applicability of this matching approach. Finally, we firmly position our work in the Cultural Heritage context through an extensive discussion of the relevance for, and issues related to this specific field. The findings are as unspectacular as expected, but nevertheless important: the provided methods can really improve interoperability in a number of important cases, but they are not universal solutions to all related problems. This paper provides a solid foundation for any future work on Semantic Interoperability in the Cultural Heritage domain, in particular for anybody intending to apply extensional methods.