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Ruben Verborgh

Free Your Metadata: a practical approach towards metadata cleaning and vocabulary reconciliation

Seth van Hooland, Ruben Verborgh, Max De Wilde, and Rik Van de Walle

The early-to-mid 2000s economic downturn in the US and Europe forced Digital Humanities projects to adopt a more pragmatic stance towards metadata creation and to deliver short-term results towards grant providers. It is precisely in this context that the concept of Linked and Open Data (LOD) has gained momentum. In this tutorial, we want to focus on metadata cleaning and reconciliation, two elementary steps to bring cultural heritage collections into the Linked Data cloud. After an initial cleaning process, involving for example the detection of duplicates and the unifying of encoding formats, metadata are reconciled by mapping a domain specific and/or local vocabulary to another (more commonly used) vocabulary that is already a part of the Semantic Web. We believe that the integration of heterogeneous collections can be managed by using subject vocabularies for cross linking between collections, since major classifications and thesauri (e.g., LCSH, DDC, RAMEAU, etc.) have been made available following Linked Data Principles.

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Published in 2012 in Proceedings of the Digital Humanities 2012 Conference.

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Cite this article easily using its BibTeX entry: 

@inproceedings{vanhooland_dh_2012,
  title = {{Free Your Metadata:} a practical approach towards metadata cleaning and vocabulary reconciliation},
  author = {van Hooland, Seth and Verborgh, Ruben and De Wilde, Max and Van de Walle, Rik},
  year = 2012,
  month = jul,
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Digital Humanities 2012 Conference},
  publisher = {Hamburg University Press},
  pages = {29--30},
  isbn = {978-3-937816-99-9},
  url = {http://www.dh2012.uni-hamburg.de/conference/programme/abstracts/free-your-metadata-a-practical-approach-towards-metadata-cleaning-and-vocabulary-reconciliation/},
}

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ACM
Seth van Hooland, Ruben Verborgh, Max De Wilde, and Rik Van de Walle. 2012. Free Your Metadata: a practical approach towards metadata cleaning and vocabulary reconciliation. In Proceedings of the Digital Humanities 2012 Conference, Hamburg University Press, 29–30.
APA
van Hooland, S., Verborgh, R., De Wilde, M., & Van de Walle, R. (2012). Free Your Metadata: a practical approach towards metadata cleaning and vocabulary reconciliation. Proceedings of the Digital Humanities 2012 Conference, 29–30.
IEEE
S. van Hooland, R. Verborgh, M. De Wilde, and R. Van de Walle, “Free Your Metadata: a practical approach towards metadata cleaning and vocabulary reconciliation,” in Proceedings of the Digital Humanities 2012 Conference, 2012, pp. 29–30.
LNCS
van Hooland, S., Verborgh, R., De Wilde, M., Van de Walle, R.: Free Your Metadata: a practical approach towards metadata cleaning and vocabulary reconciliation. In: Proceedings of the Digital Humanities 2012 Conference. pp. 29–30. Hamburg University Press (2012).
MLA
van Hooland, Seth, et al. “Free Your Metadata: a Practical Approach towards Metadata Cleaning and Vocabulary Reconciliation.” Proceedings of the Digital Humanities 2012 Conference, Hamburg University Press, 2012, pp. 29–30.

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