The Thesaurus for French Local Archives and the Semantic Web

The role of controlled vocabularies is more and more important in the management and retrieval (search) of resources. As essential components of the Semantic Web, authority systems are exposed as Linked Data and used as pivots in projects and applications to facilitate search and linking of resources. The Archives of France (an agency of the Ministry of Culture) seized the opportunity of making available on the web the thesaurus for local archives to test Linked Data technologies. Since January 2011, a website makes it possible to browse the thesaurus, to download RDF/XML documents but also to search via SPARQL which is the query language for RDF structured data (see: http://data.culture.fr/thesaurus/). This project was also an opportunity to align data with other controlled vocabularies and resources (thesaurus RAMEAU and Dbpedia) and to implement a solution for persistent identifiers of concepts of the thesaurus. This paper presents this open government data initiative, aiming not only to establish an interoperability framework between archival data, but also to consider archival data with other cultural data.