Ricardo Giuliani Martini

Annotated Documents and Expanded CIDOC-CRM Ontology in the Automatic Construction of a Virtual Museum

The Museum of the Person (Museu da Pessoa, MP) is a virtual museum with the purpose of exhibit life stories of common people. Its assets are composed of several interviews involving people whose stories we want to perpetuate. So the museum holds an heterogeneous collection of XML (eXtensible Markup Language) documents that constitute the working repository. The main idea is to extract automatically the information included in the repository in order to build the virtual museum’s exhibition rooms. The goal of this paper is to describe an architectural approach to build a system that will create the virtual rooms from the XML repository to enable visitors to lookup individual life stories and also inter-cross information among them. We adopted the standard for museum ontologies CIDOC-CRM (CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model) refined with FOAF (Friend of a Friend) and DBpedia ontologies to represent OntoMP. That ontology is intended to allow a conceptual navigation over the available information. The approach here discussed is based on a TripleStore and uses SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language) to extract the information. Aiming at the extraction of meaningful information, we built a text filter that converts the interviews into a RDF triples file that reflects the assets described by the ontology.

A Reduced CRM-Compatible Form Ontology for the Virtual Emigration Museum

In this paper we discuss the construction of a Reduced CRM-compatible form ontology for the virtual Emigration Museum based in the international standard for museum ontologies, CIDOC-CRM. To extract knowledge from the information of the virtual Emigration Museum when navigating through it, abstract data models should be used to conceptualize, the emigration documents stored in a relational database. In that way, resorting to an ontology (as abstract layer), the information contained in those documents can be accessed by the end-users (the museum visitors) to learn about the emigration phenomena. We also describe how we instantiate the ontology through a parser that automatically translates a plain text description of emigration data into RDF. Finally, we also discuss the choice of a triple storage system to save the RDF triples in order to enable the use of SPARQL to query the RDF data.

Architectural approaches to build the museum of the person

The Museum of the Person (Museu da Pessoa, MP) is a virtual museum aimed at exhibiting life stories of common people. Its assets are composed of several interviews involving people whose stories we want to perpetuate. So the museum holds an heterogeneous collection of XML (eXtensible Markup Language) documents that constitute the working repository. The main idea is to extract automatically the information included in the repository in order to build the web pages that realize the museums exhibition rooms. This project started by creating a specific ontology (OntoMP) for the knowledge repository of MP. That ontology is intended to allow a conceptual navigation over the available information. We will adopt the standard for museum ontologies CIDOC-CRM (CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model) refined with FOAF to represent OntoMP. The objective of this paper is to discuss different architectural approaches to build a system that will create the virtual rooms from the XML repository to enable visitors to lookup individual life stories and also intercross information among them. The first architecture is based on a TripleStore and uses SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language) technology to extract the information, while the second proposal is based on a Relational Database and uses CaVa Generator to query the repository and build the exhibition spaces.

Formal Description and Automatic Generation of Learning Spaces Based on Ontologies

A good virtual Learning Space (LS) should convey pertinent learning information to the visitors at the most adequate time and locations to favor their knowledge acquisition.Considering the consolidation of the internet and the improvement of the interaction, searching, and learning mechanisms, we propose a generic architecture, called CaVa, to create virtual Learning Spaces building up on cultural institution documents. More precisely, our proposal is to automatically create ontology-based virtual learning environments.Thus, to impart relevant learning materials to the virtual LS, we propose the use of ontologies to represent the key concepts and semantic relations in an user- and machine-understandable format. These concepts together with the data (extracted from the real documents) stored in a digital storage format (XML datasets, relational databases, etc.) are displayed in an ontology-based learning space that enables the visitors to use the available features and tools to learn about a specific domain.According to the approach here discussed, each desired virtual LS must be specified rigorously through a domain specific language (DSL) that was designed and implemented.To validate the proposed architecture, three case studies will be used as instances of CaVa architecture.

OntoMP, an ontology to build the museum of the person

This paper is concerned with the creation of a specific ontology for the knowledge repository of the Museum of the Person (Museu da Pessoa). The Museum of the Person assets are composed of several interviews (collected previously for a large cultural project) involving common people, to perpetuate their life stories. The museum holds an heterogeneous collection of XML documents. In such format, the collection items are many times not recognizable and understandable by the visitors who wish to explore it. Therefore, we intend to use an ontology that allows a conceptual navigation over the available information, enabling the visitors to extract knowledge during the visit to these life stories. So, this paper aims at presenting the ontology we have developed using CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CIDOC-CRM) [1] to enable visitors to lookup individual life stories, read them, and also intercross information among a cluster of life stories to build up the story of a company/institution or to study social behaviors and customs.

Building the Museum of the Person from RDF Triples and SPARQL

The Museum of the Person (MP) is a virtual museum that aims to show life stories of people, whether they are famous or anonymous. Its repository contains a collection of interviews, in XML (eXtensible Markup Language). Each interview tells the story of a persons life, describing events and other special situations that person has participated. The main objective is to on build web pages that carry out the museum exhibition rooms. To feed the exhibition rooms it is necessary to (automatically) extract the information included in the repository. Initially was constructed an ontology specific to the repository of the Museum of the Person, designated OntoMP. Then we adopted a standard to create ontologies for museums, CIDOC-CRM (CIDOC - Conceptual Reference Model) refined with FOAF (Friend of a Friend) and DBpedia to represent OntoMP. This article aims to discuss the construction of virtual rooms using a TripleStore to store the repository information and SPARQL technology (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language) to extract information from the XML repository.

Automatic generation of virtual learning spaces driven by CaVa DSL : an experience report

Several applications are based on Domain-Specific Languages (DSL). They provide the right terminology to a peculiar problem/subject, because they use a particular domain vocabulary that defines abstract concepts, different from general-purpose languages. Aiming an easy generation of virtual Learning Spaces (LS) for the use of the responsible of institutional archives or museums, we have idealized and developed an external domain-specific language, called CaVa DSL, to describe, in an abstract level, virtual exhibition rooms in the museum curators viewpoint, giving the curator the possibility to specify the virtual LS upon a domain ontology vocabulary. We also contribute with a set of processors that deal with CaVa DSL and generates virtual Learning Spaces, turning available the navigation over important and real information contained in archival documents to the public through virtual museums. To demonstrate the obtained results, we present a running example along the paper showing the virtual LS generation process.

Bridging the Gap between bdME and OntoME

The Semantic Web aims at building a Web where data is enriched with meaningful annotations. In other words, data is semantically organized in such a way that both human and machine can understand and query it, aiming at the creation of dynamic Web pages. Ontologies, as a keystone of the Semantic Web, have gained an ample acceptance as an information model, which can be used for several purposes, such as information retrieval in the Web. However, data is normally stored in databases, which present various problems in the Semantic Web context, because data is not semantically annotated. Aiming at retrieving rich results in the sense of meaning, several ways of relating databases with ontologies have emerged. This paper presents a mapping – with the aid of a framework called Ontop – as a solution for the communication problem between the relational database of the Emigration Museum of Fafe (EMF) and the ontology of the Emigration Museum (OntoME), which describes the Cultural Heritage domain. This mapping will be used to realize the CaVa architecture, aiming at the creation of dynamic Web pages as virtual Learning Spaces. Real examples of the mapping process are presented.

CaVa: An Example of the Automatic Generation of Virtual Learning Spaces

In order to construct web Learning Spaces (LS), more than collect and digitalize information, a powerful data extraction and querying engine and a sophisticated web publishing mechanism are needed. In this paper, a system to automatically construct those learning spaces based on a digital repository is presented. The system takes XML files from repositories and populates an ontology (representing the knowledge base, the core of our system) to create the triples internal representation. A Domain Specific Language (CaVaDSL) will be used to specify the learning spaces based on that ontology. The formal description, written in that DSL, will be processed by Cavagen engine to generate the final LS.

Automatizing ontology population to drive the navigation on Virtual Learning Spaces

The creation of Learning Spaces on the Web, like the exhibition rooms of virtual museums, supported by an ontology that enables a conceptual navigation over the learning objects exposed, is an hard and complex task but of uttermost importance for the success of the knowledge acquisition process. In our opinion, the creation must be systematic and reusable from case to case, based on the query of the ontology instances that describe the museum assets. We will discuss how the ontology definition drives the way SPARQL (SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language) queries extract information from the TripleStore to be prepared for visualization. However, to enable this approach, we need to populate the ontology in an automatic way, extracting the data from the annotated documents in the institution repository. We intend to show how that process can be implemented using the Museum of the Person (MP) as a case-study, describing the XML2RDF tool developed. To illustrate the complete approach proposed we will include a guided visit to the exhibition rooms of MP created according to that proposal and by our tools.