=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2214/paper12
|storemode=property
|title=ARKIVO: an Ontology for Describing Archival Resources
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2214/paper12.pdf
|volume=Vol-2214
|authors=Laura Pandolfo,Luca Pulina,Marek Zielinski
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/cilc/PandolfoPZ18
}}
==ARKIVO: an Ontology for Describing Archival Resources==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2214/paper12.pdf
ARKIVO: an Ontology for Describing Archival
Resources
Laura Pandolfo1 , Luca Pulina1 , and Marek Zieliński2
1
Dipartimento di Chimica e Farmacia, Università di Sassari, via Vienna 2, 07100
Sassari – Italy, laura.pandolfo@uniss.it, lpulina@uniss.it
2
Pilsudski Institute of America, 138 Greenpoint Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11222 – USA
MZielinski@pilsudski.org
Abstract. In this paper we present arkivo, an ontology designed to
accommodate the archival description of historical document collections.
The aim of arkivo is to provide a reference schema for a rich represen-
tation of data elements in digital historical archives. This paper briefly
reports design and implementation of arkivo, as well as its applica-
tion on a real world case study, namely the Józef Pilsudski Institute of
America digitized collections.
1 Context & Motivation
Information technologies changed the way of doing archival research. The real
change happened in the 1990s, after the advent of the Web, when a great number
of historical documents were published online stored in digital archives, by pro-
viding the users the possibility to have a direct access to millions of documents
in a rapid and easy way.
Recently, digital archives are facing new challenges in order to overcome tra-
ditional data management and information browsing. In this context, Semantic
Web (SW) [1] technologies can improve digital archives by facilitating archival
metadata storage and adding semantic capabilities, which increase the quality of
the information retrieval process. In particular, ontologies, which are defined as
a formal specification of domain knowledge conceptualization [2], play a key role
in several aspects, e.g., resources description by means of taxonomies and vo-
cabularies in order to promote interoperability and consistency between different
sources [3].
In the last decade, there has been a great amount of effort in designing
vocabularies and metadata standards to catalogue documents and collections,
such as Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FBRB) 1 , MAchine-
Readable Cataloging (MARC) 2 , Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) 3 ,
and Encoded Archival Description (EAD) 4 , just to cite a few well-known ex-
amples. Metadata standards such as FRBR, EAD and MODS seem to be more
1
http://www.cidoc-crm.org/frbroo/
2
https://www.loc.gov/marc/
3
http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/
4
https://www.loc.gov/ead/
devoted to human consumption rather than machine processing [4], while con-
cerning MARC some experts experienced that it is not suitable neither for ma-
chine processable nor for actionable metadata [5, 6]. Also, MODS is focused on
objects such as books, and EAD, even reflecting the hierarchy of an archive, is
focused on finding aids and the support for digitized objects is limited. Despite
the wide range of metadata standards, there is an ongoing lack of clarity regard-
ing the use of these resources, which leads to the conclusion that in absence of
a standardized vocabulary or ontology, different institutions will continue to use
their own distinct systems and different metadata schemas.
In this paper we present arkivo, an ontology designed to accommodate
the archival description, supporting archive workers by encompassing both the
hierarchical structure of archives and the rich metadata attributes used during
the annotation process. The strength of arkivo is not only to provide a reference
schema for publishing Linked Data [7], but also to describe the relevant elements
contained in these documents.
The paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we describe the design process
of arkivo and we give some details about the implementation. In Section 3,
we describe the application of arkivo to the digitized collections of the Józef
Pilsudski Institute of America, and we conclude the paper in discussing future
work.
2 ARKIVO Ontology
In this Section, we describe the design process of arkivo, in order to define key
concepts and relations. We also give some insights about its implementation.
As a starting point, we considered the archival management practices and
the most common methods used by archives for storing and cataloging materials.
Archival resources are typically organized following a hierarchy composed of
different layers (i.e., fonds, file, series, item), in which fonds represent the highest
level of that structure, while item the lowest.
In the design phase, we considered the best practices used by archive workers
in the metadata collection process. Usually, this tasks is conducted by selecting
items and trying to locate, in addition to a title and abstract, key persons, places,
dates and events mentioned in the item. These data are especially important in
describing an historical document. One can sometimes identify the author, or
document creation date, in which case the assignment of the role can be more
specific. In most cases, however, one can only note that the name, place or
date was mentioned in the document. We decided to model these categories of
information into the ontology, in order to give all the useful elements to support
the annotation process.
Next, we examined some existing standards and metadata vocabularies po-
tentially compatible with the considered domain, in order to re-use them as core
ontologies. In the following, we report core ontologies and vocabularies used in
arkivo. Dublin Core [8] and schema.org [9] represent the most used vocab-
ularies for describing and cataloging both Web and physical resources, such as
Web pages and books. Due to the generic nature of their terms, we also refer
to BIBO5 ontology in order to have a detailed and exhaustive document classi-
fication. Concerning the description of personal information, we decided to use
FOAF6 , a widely used vocabulary to describe persons as well as organizations.
arkivo uses also Geonames7 ontology for linking a place name to its geograph-
ical location and LODE [10] ontology which is one of the most often-used model
for publishing events as Linked Data.
arkivo has been developed using the OWL 2 DL language [11]. In the follow-
ing, we report some implementation details of the ontology8 . The main classes
in arkivo are Collection, which represents the set of documents or collections,
and Item, which is the smallest indivisible unit of an archive. In order to de-
scribe the structure of the archive, different subclasses of the class Collection
are modeled, namely the subclasses Fonds, File and Series. Using existential
quantification property restriction (owl:someValuesFrom), we defined that the
class Item as the class of individuals that are linked to individuals in the class
Fonds by the isPartOf property, as shown below using the DL syntax [12]
Item v ∃ isP artOf.F onds
This means that there is an expectation that every instance of Item is part of a
collection, and that collection is a member of the class Fonds. This is useful to capture
incomplete knowledge. For example, if we know that the individual 701.180/11884 is
an item, we can infer that it is part at least of one collection.
Moreover, we defined some union of classes for those classes that perform a specific
function on the ontology. In this case, we used owl:unionOf constructor to combine
atomic classes to complex classes, as we describe in the following:
CreativeT hing ≡ Collection t HistoricalEvent t Item
This class denotes things created by agents and it includes individuals that are con-
tained in at least one of the classes Collection, HistoricalEvent or Item.
N amedT hing ≡ P lace t Date t Agent
It refers to things, such as date, place and agent, that are related to individuals in the
CreativeThing by the object property isMentionedIn, and it includes individuals that
belong to at least one of the classes Place, Date or Agent.
3 Case Study: the Józef Pilsudski Archival Collections
We applied the arkivo ontology to describe the archival holdings, partially digitized,
of the Pilsudski Institute of America. In order to support data integration process of
combining data residing at different sources, we used external identifiers. In this way,
the resources of Pilsudski Digital Archival Collections have been linked to external
5
http://bibliontology.com/
6
http://www.foaf-project.org/
7
http://www.geonames.org/ontology
8
The full arkivo documentation is available at https://github.com/ArkivoTeam/
ARKIVO
Fig. 1. Graphical representation of archival collections data using arkivo.
datasets of the Linked Data Cloud in order to enrich the information provided with
each resource. We selected, among others, Wikidata9 , DBpedia10 , and VIAF (Virtual
International Authority File)11 , as the most common source of identifiers of people,
organizations and historical events.
In Figure 1, we report an example of individuals and properties stored in the
Pilsudski digital archive, and how these data can be connected to resources belonging
to external datasets. The individuals are drawn as labeled ellipses, object properties
between individuals are shown as labeled edges, while boxes represent data properties
related to individuals. Looking at this figure, we can see that the fonds “A701.025” is
stored by the organization “Pilsudski Institute of America” and it has different data
properties, such as its title, i.e., Wojny Polskie, its creation start date, i.e., 1914, and
end date, i.e., 1984. The object property isAbout reveals the main topic addressed in
this fonds, represented by the individual “R10001”, which has its title, i.e., Kampania
wrześniowa, and its date, i.e.,1939. The individual “R10001”, which belongs to both
the class HistoricalEvent and the class Subject, is in relationship to the DBpedia’s
instance “Invasion of Poland” through the property owl:sameAs, which indicates that
these two URI references actually refer to the same thing. The integration with external
dataset, such as DBpedia, makes it possible to discover and share information.
The archival collections of the Pilsudski Institute of America can be effectively ex-
plored and queried at http://stardog.vuotto.tech/#/databases/arkivo_x312 . The
triple store has been implemented using Stardog 5 Community edition [13].
9
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Main_Page
10
https://wiki.dbpedia.org
11
https://viaf.org
12
We provided a test user with username user test and password test4jpi.
4 Conclusion and Future Work
In this paper we briefly presented arkivo, an ontology designed to accommodate the
archival description of historical document collections. We reported the current usage
of arkivo in the context of the historical archive of the Józef Pilsudski Institute of
America. In our work on the Józef Pilsudski archival collections, we collected approx-
imately 300 thousand triples and its knowledge base is populated, among others, by
14,199 authors, 12,848 collections, 28,8644 items, 1,572 places and 6,615 dates.
Currently, we are working on the realization of the ontology-based digital archive
of the Pilsudski Institute. As future work, we will investigate methodologies for the
automatization of the ontology population process exploiting the techniques presented
in [14, 15].
References
1. Berners-Lee, T., Hendler, J., Lassila, O., et al.: The semantic web. Scientific
american 284(5) (2001) 28–37
2. Guarino, N., Oberle, D., Staab, S.: What is an ontology? In: Handbook on ontolo-
gies. Springer (2009) 1–17
3. Kruk, S.R., McDaniel, B.: Semantic Digital Libraries. Springer (2009)
4. Alemu, G., Stevens, B., Ross, P., Chandler, J.: Linked data for libraries: Benefits of
a conceptual shift from library-specific record structures to rdf-based data models.
New Library World 113(11/12) (2012) 549–570
5. Coyle, K., Hillmann, D.: Resource description and access (rda): Cataloging rules
for the 20th century. D-Lib 13(1/2) (2007)
6. Tennant, R.: Marc must die. LIBRARY JOURNAL-NEW YORK- 127(17) (2002)
26–27
7. Bizer, C., Heath, T., Berners-Lee, T.: Linked data – the story so far. Semantic
services, interoperability and web applications: emerging concepts (2009) 205–227
8. Weibel, S.L., Koch, T.: The dublin core metadata initiative. D-lib magazine 6(12)
(2000) 1082–9873
9. Patel-Schneider, P.F.: Analyzing schema.org. In: International Semantic Web
Conference, Springer (2014) 261–276
10. Shaw, R., Troncy, R., Hardman, L.: Lode: Linking open descriptions of events. In:
Asian Semantic Web Conference, Springer (2009) 153–167
11. Grau, B.C., Horrocks, I., Motik, B., Parsia, B., Patel-Schneider, P., Sattler, U.:
Owl 2: The next step for owl. Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the
World Wide Web 6(4) (2008) 309–322
12. Baader, F., Lutz, C.: Description logic. In: Studies in Logic and Practical Reason-
ing. Volume 3. Elsevier (2007) 757–819
13. Inc., C.: Stardog 5: The manual. Available online: http://docs. stardog.com/. Last
accessed on June 2018 (2017)
14. Pandolfo, L., Pulina, L., Adorni, G.: A framework for automatic population of
ontology-based digital libraries. In: AI* IA 2016 Advances in Artificial Intelligence.
Springer (2016) 406–417
15. Pandolfo, L., Pulina, L.: Adnoto: A self-adaptive system for automatic ontology-
based annotation of unstructured documents. In: To appear in Proc. of the 30th
International Conference on Industrial, Engineering, Other Applications of Applied
Intelligent Systems. Springer (2017)