Mapping Metadata is More Making more use out of existing metadata from Digital Libraries using Semantic Web technologies

The SWHi (Semantic Web for History) project is aimed at integrating, combining, and deducing information on the early American history, based on the Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans, 1639-1800 collection, to assist general users or historians in exploring American history by using new technology offered by the Semantic Web. What are the possibilities of Semantic Web technologies for organizations which have lots of structured data, such as metadata, available? These organizations are for example libraries and museums. In this Master’s thesis, descriptive (bibliographic) metadata are mapped to an historical ontology using an out-of-the-box ontology and existing topic hierarchies on the World Wide Web. This mapping is done by generating a frequency table and exploring the data. On the one hand it will show whether mapping the metadata to an ontology will create more information, on the other hand it will become clear that there is more into mapping metadata. This explains the title of the thesis: Mapping Metadata is More. This results in a populated ontology. The ontology is more than just structured data, but a semantically enriched knowledge base with relationships. Eventually, the ontology can be put to use for querying. This is evaluated in Sesame using SeRQL, which queries at the semantic level, with performance measures like Precision and Recall. Ontologies are the backbone of the Semantic Web, and other uses are also possible.