Disseminating Heritage Records as Linked Open Data

In Flanders, Belgium, many heritage institutions disseminate their metadata using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. However this protocol does not offer granular access to the metadata. This can be solved by exposing the metadata as Linked Data. For this, we developed a semantic metadata schema consisting of two layers: One layer gives a Dublin Core description and is responsible for searching the whole dataset. The other layer holds a reference to the original metadata record, e.g., MARC record. Doing this, the user can still access the original record, once he found the data of interest using the Dublin Core description. Then, these metadata records are enriched in two stages: First, we enrich the records internally, interlinking all the harvested metadata from the Flemish heritage institutions. Then, we enrich the records with other datasets like DBpedia, weaving the information into the Web of Data. For publishing the records as linked open data, we enhanced the OAI2LOD Server to import data coming from different OAI-PMH repositories, to expose the records as linked open data using our developed metadata schema and to enrich the records using our metadata enrichment algorithm. This way, the data from Flemish heritage repositories are linked with each other and published as linked open data.