Mapping Metadata for SWHi: Aligning Schemas with Library Metadata for a Historical Ontology

What are the possibilities of Semantic Web technologies for organizations which traditionally have lots of structured data, such as metadata, available? A library is such a particular organization. We mapped a digital library’s descriptive (bibliographic) metadata for a large historical document collection encoded in MARC21 to a historical ontology using an out-of-the-box ontology, existing topic hierarchies on the World Wide Web and other resources. We also created and explored useful relations for such an ontology. We show that mapping the metadata to an ontology adds information and makes the existing information more easily accessible for users. The paper discusses various issues that arose during the mapping process. The result of mapping metadata to RDF/OWL is a populated ontology, ready to be deployed.