Metadata-based Access to Cultural Heritage Collections: the RHCe Use Case

More and more cultural heritage organizations see a great opportunity by opening up their collections via the Web to expand their userbase. In this paper we look at our current work in a specific use case, a cultural heritage organization called RHCe that wanted to open up its photo and video archives to the public. We demonstrate in this paper how we can utilize metadata to offer a homogeneous multi-faceted view over their heterogeneous archives. We also discuss what to do if metadata is not available for resources and how we can use a simple mechanism like tagging to still get high quality annotations. We do this by relating the user tags to concepts in an ontology and we discuss some mechanism to do this (semi-) automatically. We also show how these techniques can be used to build a user model and how we can identify the most probable annotations that can be used by domain experts to improve their annotation-time efficiency.