Integrated access to cultural heritage resources through representation and alignment of controlled vocabularies

Purpose - To show how semantic web techniques can help address semantic interoperability issues in the broad cultural heritage domain, allowing users an integrated and seamless access to heterogeneous collections. Design/methodology/approach - This paper presents the heterogeneity problems to be solved. It introduces semantic web techniques that can help in solving them, focusing on the representation of controlled vocabularies and their semantic alignment. It gives pointers to some previous projects and experiments that have tried to address the problems discussed. Findings - Semantic web research provides practical technical and methodological approaches to tackle the different issues. Two contributions of interest are the simple knowledge organisation system model and automatic vocabulary alignment methods and tools. These contributions were demonstrated to be usable for enabling semantic search and navigation across collections. Research limitations/implications - The research aims at designing different representation and alignment methods for solving interoperability problems in the context of controlled subject vocabularies. Given the variety and technical richness of current research in the semantic web field, it is impossible to provide an in-depth account or an exhaustive list of references. Every aspect of the paper is, however, given one or several pointers for further reading. Originality/value - This article provides a general and practical introduction to relevant semantic web techniques. It is of specific value for the practitioners in the cultural heritage and digital library domains who are interested in applying these methods in practice.