cultural heritage data teams

Abstract: This paper reports a methodological pivot from the Open Khipu Repository to the Khipu Field Guide (KFG) database, prompted by stalled progress on the OKR, and a full re-analysis of the resulting 650-khipu sample. Three findings recur across every analysis attempted. First, khipu size confounds nearly every derived structural count, explaining 42-70% of its variance; all subsequent models control for it. Second, the two-letter name prefix (AS, UR, HP, QU, JC, MM, KH) identifies the original cataloger, not a site or period, which turns documentation completeness into a second confound that must be modeled explicitly. Controlling for both, khipus cataloged by Hugo Pereyra's Proyecto Quipu (HP) show significantly fewer Ascher sum-relation types than Gary Urton's (UR) khipus (p = 0.044), while the Ascher-cataloged (AS) khipus are too collinear with their own near-total lack of side/direction documentation to assess (VIF = 5.0). Third, generic structural clustering (UMAP+HDBSCAN) does not separate the pooled 650-khipu sample from two independent null models (permutation and Gaussian), corroborating an independent conclusion already reached by the KFG itself; the same test restricted to a single cataloger (UR) proved not reproducible across runtime environments and is reported here as a methodological caveat rather than evidence of structure. A targeted replication of the KFG's own S/Z-knot spatial-block heuristic for calendar/astronomical khipus recovers 8 of 10 published candidates and proposes 34 additional ones under the same criterion.

Abstract: Wikidata is a large, heterogeneous knowledge graph and applying data quality metrics requires context-specific approaches. The "richness" quality metric is currently under-researched and typically restricted to the ontology level, which fails to capture entity-specific structural depth. To address this gap, we introduce SQuIREL, a method that measures richness directly at the entity level using six dimensions: Semantic Specificity, Qualifier Density, Internal Connectivity, Reference Provenance, External Network Connectivity, and Linguistic Accessibility. These dimensions are kept disaggregated to preserve actionability for targeted editorial intervention. We apply this metric to two case studies of oil paintings (Brazilian vs. French) and writers (grouped by citizenship and gender) to demonstrate how it surfaces representational inequalities that may indicate systemic bias. Our metric successfully distinguishes between highly tailored and basic entity profiles, revealing nuances that raw counts and existing aggregate scores obscure. Specifically, it identifies structural imbalances, such as 48% of Brazilian paintings clustering as low-richness stubs against 0% in the French cohort, as well as intersectional patterns, including contrasting gender gaps between UK and Nigerian writers.

Abstract: Discovering and disambiguating entities from multimodal and heterogeneous data is a key challenge in discovery science, where relevant knowledge is often implicit and distributed across modalities. We present KARAMEL, a framework for multimodal entity linking (MEL) - the task of aligning visual and textual mentions to entities in a knowledge base - in the cultural heritage domain. Unlike prior vision-language models that primarily rely on surface-level multimodal alignment, our approach incorporates sociohistorical and contextual knowledge through a knowledge-aware architecture that fuses a vision-language encoder with a heterogeneous graph neural network. This design enables contextual reasoning over complex relational structures and supports robust entity disambiguation under ambiguous or underspecified evidence. To benchmark multimodal discovery in this setting, we introduce WikiMuSA (Wikidata-based Multimodal Semantic data for Art), a new dataset that links artworks to Wikidata entities via images, textual descriptions, and structured contextual knowledge. Experimental results show that KARAMEL surpasses strong baselines, particularly on implicit or abstract mentions, while ablation studies highlight the critical role of domain-specific, structured context in learning expressive representations. While instantiated in the cultural heritage domain, KARAMEL addresses a general knowledge discovery problem and applies to other scientific settings involving multimodal observations and heterogeneous background knowledge. Both the dataset and source code are made publicly available.

Abstract: We demonstrate X-DigCheck, a domain-independent environment for building and maintaining application profiles as they co-evolve with the data they describe. Profiles developed against a fixed ontology quickly drift from the schema they were meant to capture. X-DigCheck treats profile construction as a continuous ontology-data co-evolution loop: data are lifted into RDF against the profile, checked through competency questions and SHACL, and the resulting reports jointly drive revisions of the ontology, mappings, constraints, and graph. The loop is agnostic to the domain and to the pipeline that produces the graph. We validate and demonstrate the tool in the cultural heritage domain, on the construction of RupeMagna-RTI, the first Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) specialisation of the Cultural Heritage Survey ODP (CHS-ODP), aligned with CIDOC-CRM/CRMdig, ArCo, CHAD-KG, and Getty AAT, with semRTI as the lifting pipeline of this use case. The demonstration lets visitors run one full turn of the loop -on the shipped Rupe Magna (Grosio, Italy) RTI survey, or on a profile and graph of their own -executing the competency-question and SHACL checks live and reading the bidirectional coverage report that flags modelling gaps and stale assumptions. The result is a portable co-evolution environment for profile engineering, together with a reusable RTI application profile produced through it. A screencast of the demonstration is available at https://zenodo.org/records/22210609.