Mobile Cultural Heritage Guide: Location-Aware Semantic Search

In this paper we explore the use of location aware mobile devices for searching and browsing a large number of general and cultural heritage information repositories. Based on GPS positioning we can determine a user’s location and context, composed of physical nearby locations, historic events that have taken place there, artworks that were created at or inspired by those locations and artists that have lived or worked there. Based on a geolocation, the user has three levels of refinement: pointing to a specific heading and selection and facets and subfacets of cultural heritage objects. In our approach two types of knowledge are combined: general knowledge about geolocations and points of interest and specialized knowledge about a particular domain, i.e. cultural heritage. We use a number of Linked Open Data sources and a number of general sources from the cultural heritage domain (including Art and Architecture Thesaurus, Union List of Artist Names) as well as data from several Dutch cultural institutions. We show three concrete scenarios where a tourist accesses localized information on his iPhone about the current environment, events, artworks or persons, which are enriched by Linked Open Data sources. We show that Linked Open Data sources in isolation are currently too limited to provide interesting semantic information but combined with each other and with a number of other sources a really informative location-based service can be created.