Bringing Cultural Heritage Information from Developing Regions to the Global Information Space as Linked Open Data: An Exploratory Metadata Aggregation Model for Sri Lankan Heritage and its Extension

摘要

Background: Sri Lankan memory institutions are currently not optimised to deliver Cultural Heritage Information (CHI) on the Web. Part of the issue is the lack of metadata aggregation. We propose an approach that would help aggregate Sri Lankan CHI with more contextual information in order to open up this information and make it more accessible.Objectives: To present a metadata model to aggregate Sri Lankan CHI provided by museums in different regions and to discuss some basic issues for future extension of our model to different Southeast Asian countries.Methods: This paper describes a metadata crosswalk approach between museum vocabularies, which was achieved by investigating over 2600 object records across four museums inside and outside Sri Lanka, and by mapping them to the Getty Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) and Resource Description Framework (RDF).Results: Based on the results of the mapping described above, we propose a metadata model to aggregate CHI that is specific to Sri Lankan cultural heritage materials.Contributions:The proposed model is a novel approach to Sri Lankan CHI domain. Based on the outcomes of this study, this paper discusses the possibility of extending the scope of this CHI metadata aggregation to other countries in Southeast Asia through adopting Linked Open Data (LOD).