Towards a semantic data infrastructure for heterogeneous Cultural Heritage data - challenges of Korean Cultural Heritage Data Model (KCHDM)

Integrating one heterogeneous heritage dataset among various heritage institutions has been a common approach in the era of ‘Open Data’. Cultural heritage institutions in Korea have also faced rapid changes of data technology and have started to discuss integration of databases among institutions. This will require a paradigm shift from independent databases to integrated databases for diverse data providers and users in the cultural heritage domain. Therefore, the ‘K-Culture Time Machine’ research project was launched with the goal of linking one heterogeneous DB with comprehensive metadata schema and developing an ontology-based information service for Korea's heritage. In this study we propose a structure of metadata schema to incorporate resources from heterogeneous databases that have their own metadata schemas already. We refer to the case of the Europeana Data Model (EDM); we come up with an ontology-based data model, called the Korean Cultural Heritage Data Model (KCHDM). The metadata schema we are proposing has as its purpose to function as an upper data model to aggregate the models of different institutions. Also, the data model aims to provide the possibility of a semantic link between heterogeneous datasets. For this goal, we propose an algorithm that extracts semantic patterns from description texts of each institution's heritage database.