Knowledge graphs preserve diverse cultural heritage views in context
Preserving contextual information in cultural heritage metadata through multidimensional knowledge graphs
Databases
Summary
Cultural heritage objects often have information that changes depending on different cultural, social, or political views. The authors point out that current knowledge graphs, which organize this kind of data, do not handle these changing viewpoints well. They introduce a new approach called multidimensional knowledge graphs that can keep track of multiple perspectives at once. This method helps preserve the complex and layered stories behind cultural heritage in a clear, queryable way.
Knowledge GraphsCultural Heritage ObjectsMetadataContextual InformationMultidimensional ModelsProvenanceSemantic InteroperabilityReificationData Contextualization
Authors
Lyndon Nixon, Valentina Presutti, Celian Ringwald, Andrea Schimmenti
Abstract
Using Knowledge Graphs (KGs) to describe Cultural Heritage Objects (CHOs) supports semantic richness and interoperability. However, standard KGs fail to capture the context-dependent validity of statements. This limitation is critical for cultural heritage metadata, which must often accommodate evolving or conflicting viewpoints, such as colonial versus post-colonial perspectives or shifting scientific consensus. While current knowledge representation methods address basic contextualization via provenance, qualifiers or reification, they lack a unified framework to simultaneously model and query data across multiple social, cultural, and political dimensions. To bridge this gap, we introduce the conceptual foundations of Multi-dimensional Knowledge Graphs (MKGs) and discuss how they preserve complex, multi-layered contexts in CHO metadata.