Multilingual access to cultural heritage content on the Semantic Web

摘要

As the amount of cultural data available on the Semantic Web is expanding, the demand of accessing this data in multiple languages is increasing. Previous work on multilingual access to cultural heritage information has shown that at least two different problems must be dealt with when mapping from ontologies to natural language: (1) mapping multilingual metadata to interoperable knowledge sources; (2) assigning multilingual knowledge to cultural data. This paper presents our effort to deal with these problems. We describe our experiences with processing museum data extracted from two distinct sources, harmonizing this data and making its content accessible in natural language. We extend prior work in two ways. First, we present a grammar-based system that is designed to generate coherent texts from Semantic Web ontologies in 15 languages. Second, we describe how this multilingual system is exploited to form queries using the standard query language SPARQL. The generation and retrieval system builds on W3C standards and is available for further research.