Automatic enrichment of cultural portals with knowledge organization systems

Abstract

During the last decades, numerous web portals have been launched to disseminate the cultural heritage. Most of these portals were developed with technologies from the syntactic web era, i.e. containing HTML pages with plain text that can be indexed by search engines, but without additional metadata and annotations of concepts belonging to knowledge organization systems that would facilitate the task of thematic specialized search engines. This paper proposes a method for recommending the knowledge organization systems that are better adjusted for the contents of a web portal and the use of these systems for the semantic annotation of the contents. To check the feasibility of the proposed method, we have applied it to the enrichment of a web portal created in the nineties that hosts a virtual catalogue of the works performed by the painter Goya. Thanks to the proposed method, we have been able to recommend knowledge organization system titled List of Subject Headings for Public Libraries because of its closeness with the portal content. In addition, two thirds of the web pages in Spanish were annotated with concepts belonging to this model. Although the accuracy of the mapping between the recognized entities in the text and the concepts of the model is not perfect, it constitutes a good base to allow web portal administrators to refine later this annotation.