Cultural Heritage (CH) is gaining a lot of attention from academic and industry perspectives. Scienti c researchers, organisations, associations, and schools are looking for appropriate technologies for annotating, integrating, sharing, accessing, analysing and visualising the mine of cultural collections and, more generally, cultural data, taking also into account the pro les and preferences of end users. Several national and European research and innovation projects have been launched to these directions. A fundamental challenge that many of these projects deal with is how to make Cultural Heritage data, which is typically made available in diverse languages and formats, mutually interoperable, so that it can be searched, linked, and presented in a harmonised way across the boundaries of a Cultural Heritage institution. Early solutions were based on the syntactic or structural level of data, without leveraging the rich semantic structures underlying the content. During the last decades, solutions based on the principles and technologies of the Semantic Web have been proposed to explicitly represent the semantics of data sources and make both their content and their semantics machine-interpretable and interoperable. In parallel, resources such as the CIDOC-CRM ecosystem have matured. As institutions bring their data to the Semantic Web level, the tasks of integrating, sharing, analysing and visualising data are now to be conceived in this new and very rich framework.
The aim of the SW4CH workshop is to bring together Computer Scientists, Data Scientists and Digital Humanities researchers and practitioners involved in the development or deployment of Semantic Web solutions for Cultural Heritage. The goal is to provide a forum, where people from these elds will have the opportunity to exchange ideas and experiences, present state of the art of realisations and outcomes of relevant projects, and discuss related challenges and solutions.
These proceedings present the eight accepted papers of the 3rd SW4CH workshop, held on the 3rd of June, 2018, in conjunction with the 15th Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2018) in Heraklion, Greece. These papers were selected from a total of twelve submissions, resulting in an acceptance rate of 67%. Each submission was peer-reviewed by three experts in the eld according to its relevance to the workshop, technical quality, quality of presentation and originality. The topics of the accepted papers range from new vocabularies and datasets for the CH domain, to novel methods for personalised recommendations, semantic clustering, alignment and enrichment, to new CH applications and use cases of Semantic Web technologies. Each paper was allocated 10 pages in the proceedings, and its authors were invited to present their paper at the workshop. The programme of the workshop also includes an invited talk on the use of Semantic Web technologies in CrossCult (an H2020 innovation project), delivered by Antonis Bikakis. A 2-page abstract of the invited talk has also been included in the proceedings.
We would like to thank all authors for submitting good papers, preparing the nal versions of their papers considering the reviewers' comments, and abiding by our deadlines. A special thanks is due to the excellent Program Committee for their hard work in reviewing the submitted papers. Their criticism and very useful comments and suggestions were instrumental in achieving this high-quality publication. The names of the PC members as well as other information about the workshop are available in the workshop's website: https://sw4ch2018.ensma.fr/.