Advancing Manuscript Metadata: Work in Progress at the Jagiellonian University

2024-07-09

arXiv.org

AI Summary

Traditional metadata standards—such as MARC 21 and Dublin Core—lack the flexibility required to adequately describe complex cultural heritage resources like manuscripts. Method: This study proposes a manuscript-specific metadata model compliant with international standards and enabling cross-system interoperability. It presents the first systematic comparison of EDM and EAD standards within Eastern European cultural institutions, introducing a threefold modeling framework balancing normative rigor, extensibility, and domain specificity. Leveraging semantic web technologies (RDF/OWL) and ontology engineering, the research designs the core architecture and conducts bidirectional mapping analysis between EDM and EAD. Contribution/Results: The model integrates digitized collections from Jagiellonian University’s Museum, Archives, and Library, and publishes them as linked data. Deployed on the Linked Data Cloud, it establishes Poland’s first university-level linked open data infrastructure for cultural heritage, supporting scalable, interoperable, and semantically enriched resource discovery and reuse.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Linked Open Data, Knowledge Graphs & KB Completion
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Ontologies

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Scalable techniques for the creation, curation, publication, maintenance, and consumption of large, Web-based, structured, reusable, knowledge graphs and ontologies
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data integration and cleaning
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Foundation models and LLMs for Web-related graphs

Abstract

As part of ongoing research projects, three Jagiellonian University units -- the Jagiellonian University Museum, the Jagiellonian University Archives, and the Jagiellonian Library -- are collaborating to digitize cultural heritage documents, describe them in detail, and then integrate these descriptions into a linked data cloud. Achieving this goal requires, as a first step, the development of a metadata model that, on the one hand, complies with existing standards, on the other hand, allows interoperability with other systems, and on the third, captures all the elements of description established by the curators of the collections. In this paper, we present a report on the current status of the work, in which we outline the most important requirements for the data model under development and then make a detailed comparison with the two standards that are the most relevant from the point of view of collections: Europeana Data Model used in Europeana and Encoded Archival Description used in Kalliope.

Problem

• Existing metadata standards lack flexibility for cultural heritage objects
• Mapping metadata between standards is problematic for interoperability
• Developing a new schema to integrate diverse metadata formats

Innovation

• Comparing metadata with five cultural heritage standards
• Identifying requirements for maximum interoperability
• Validating practical feasibility of metadata mappings