IASA 2019 Annual Conference

Good, consistent metadata is essential to find content in an archive. Many institutions use thesauri to structure and unify their metadata. Keeping a thesaurus up to date and of consistent quality is already a major challenge, and now there is the additional challenge of realizing the promise of Linked Open Data in practice. For instance, thesauri can be used to make connections to various distributed collections of cultural heritage objects. In this presentation Sound and Vision will showcase two cases where alignments play a central role. Alignments of thesaurus entries with reliable external sources offer solutions for not only ensuring thesaurus quality, but, more importantly, for tackling the challenge of linking to external vocabularies. The first use case centers around cleansing our thesaurus of a historical legacy of thousands of unvalidated concepts of various origin. The second one involves music and library sources such as Discogs and Wikidata that we use to both enrich our thesaurus and add information to these sources themselves, in the form of alignments. This opens the doors to the wealth of possibilities offered by Linked Data, which we will elaborate on in our presentation.