Curation of Physical Objects in Botany: Architecture and Development of a Linked Open Data-Based Application

Cultural heritage institutions store and manage large volumes of historical information, that have great material and humanitarian value. Their means of data organization, often obsolete, hinders the dissemination and reuse of information to be made in an effective way. In this sense, an application of Linked Open Data (LOD) technology is the possibility to extend the knowledge of a collection, with the use of open data already consolidated on the web to describe artworks or any type of physical object. This paper introduces a generic architecture based on an Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) methodology that connects LOD data from cultural heritage available on the web, generates descriptive content for physical objects and provides the mapping of research institutes engaged in studying them, highlighting their collaboration network. For instance, an implementation of the architecture was dedicated to the domain of Botany and can assist herbarium managers in creating exhibitions about medicinal plants. In this paper, we present a software architecture that provides an automatic method for creating dynamic pages from data stored in interconnected databases, and an application, which supports visitation systems with visualization and interaction mechanisms to encourage visitor learning.