Supporting the End-User Curation of Cultural Heritage Knowledge Graphs

Abstract

Knowledge Graphs are becoming widely used as a method to capture and integrate diverse sources of data into a unified structure of nodes and links. Cultural heritage is an active domain for Knowledge Graph research, bringing together the metadata of cultural objects with associated information about their use and history. Tools exist for the searching and browsing of Knowledge Graphs but on their own they often do not offer the interpretative support required by a more general audience. This paper describes an approach to creating a layer of interpretation over a Knowledge Graph. Experts in the cultural domain, without expertise in the underlying technology, can curate paths through the Knowledge Graph, selecting and associating cultural objects, which are automatically displayed in the path with relevant content from the Knowledge Graph. Path authors can also provide additional interpretation as well invite responses from followers of the paths. A case study is described in the domain of European pipe organs in which domain experts can curate paths through a Knowledge Graph of currently approximately 2000 objects. The potential of the approach as a way of incrementally formalizing changes or additions to the Knowledge Graph emerged as a theme with domain experts. The applicability of the approach to cultural Knowledge Graphs in general is discussed.