Soft ontologies and similarity cluster tools to facilitate exploration and discovery of cultural heritage resources

We describe a system and tools that we are creating and that allows us to produce similarity (SC) cluster representations of the contents of our Culture Heritage (CH) Forum. The motivation for introducing these types of technologies in the context of cultural heritage materials is to allow the use of spatial vector-based computational techniques that result in similarity mapping. We propose that similarity mappings can be used to build navigation tools that enable users to explore these types of materials without knowing the search parameters in advance. Also, this method of access to cultural heritage materials might be less dependent on a priori determined ontologies than conventional curatorial practices. This is in line with our final objective of developing representation methods and visualization tools that describe cultural heritage material while at the same time allowing the user freedom to interpret the material, i.e. the open interpretation approach.