Thesis of Joffrey Decourselle


Subject:
Semantic Enrichment of Cultural Entities

Defense date: 06/11/2018

Advisor: Mohand-Said Hacid

Summary:

Many efforts have been done these last two decades to facilitate the management and representation of cultural heritage data. However, many systems used in cultural institutions are still based on flat models and are generally isolated which prevents any reuse or validation of information. This Ph.D. aims at proposing new solutions for enhancing the representation and enrichment of cultural entities using the Semantic Web technologies. This work consists in two major steps to reach this objective. On the one hand, the research is focused on the metadata migration process to transform the schema of existing knowledge catalogs to new semantic models. This study is based on a real-world case study using the concepts from the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) which allows to generate graph-based knowledge bases. Yet, the quality of such a migration is the cornerstone for a successful adoption. Thus, several challenges related to the tuning and the evaluation of such a process must be faced. On the other hand, the research aims at taking advantage of these semantic models to facilitate the linkage of information with external and structured sources (e.g., Linked Open Data) and extracting additional information from other sources (e.g., microblogging) to build a new generation of thematic knowledge bases according to the user needs. However, in this case, the aggregation of information from heterogeneous sources requires additional steps to match and merge both correspondences at schema and instance level.