Semantic annotation and search of cultural-heritage collections: The MultimediaN E-Culture demonstrator

In this article we describe a Semantic Web application for semantic annotation and search in large virtual collections of cultural-heritage objects, indexed with multiple vocabularies. During the annotation phase we harvest, enrich and align collection metadata and vocabularies. The semantic-search facilities support keyword-based queries of the graph (currently 20 M triples), resulting in semantically grouped result clusters, all representing potential semantic matches of the original query. We show two sample search scenario’s. The annotation and search software is open source and is already being used by third parties. All software is based on established Web standards, in particular HTML/XML, CSS, RDF/OWL, SPARQL and JavaScript.