Poisonous India or the Importance of a Semantic and Multilingual Enrichment Strategy

Cultural heritage information systems offer access to objects coming from museums, archives and libraries. To enhance retrieval performance and access across languages, metadata is enriched with controlled vocabularies or other datasets with structured information. During this process many pitfalls occur which lead to wrong or poor enrichments thus decreasing the user experience. Taking the use case of Europeana, this paper investigates the extent of enrichment flaws and their causes. A categorization of these deficiencies is proposed as well as a strategy to avoid common enrichment mistakes.