Large Scale Semantic Annotation, Indexing and Search at The National Archives

This paper describes a tool developed to improve access to the enormous volume of data housed at the UK’s National Archives, both for the general public and for specialist researchers. The system we have developed, TNA-Search, enables a multi-paradigm search over the entire electronic archive (42TB of data in various formats). The search functionality allows queries that arbitrarily mix any combination of full-text, structural, linguistic and semantic queries. The archive is annotated and indexed with respect to a massive semantic knowledge base containing data from the LOD cloud, data.gov.uk, related TNA projects, and a large geographical database. The semantic annotation component achieves approximately 83% F-measure, which is very reasonable considering the wide range of entities and document types and the open domain. The technologies are being adopted by real users at The National Archives and will form the core of their suite of search tools, with additional in-house interfaces.