On the semantic interoperability of digital archival descriptions

The international archival community relies on the existence of standards as the means to both reliably interchange information and to promote its accessibility. Departing from current standards for the description of archival entities and authority records, namely ISAD(G) and ISAAR(CPF), the work described herein establishes a means to make semantic interoperability possible for archival descriptions under ISAD(G) in the context of the Semantic Web. For the purpose of this work, semantic interoperability is understood as the use of explicit semantics to facilitate archival descriptions integration with the main objective of fostering the automated or semi-automated use of the information. This paper introduces a mapping of ISAD(G) archival descriptions to an ontology written in a Web-oriented ontology language, as the main artefact to promote semantic interoperability in archival descriptions. It has been achieved through the introduction of a common ground for the definition of concepts, based on the use of shared definitions from in widely-used upper ontologies. The final aim is to provide advanced services and access facilities which can serve as improved access points in archival description.