Using semantics in XML information access : application to the Portuguese Emigration Museum

Abstract

This article presents an ongoing work, in the context of the Portuguese Emigration Museum, about information access in XML collections associated with semantic information. The museum asset is made up of documents of more than 8 kinds, ranging from passport records to photos/cards or building-drawings. In this paper we discuss the approach used to create the exhibition rooms of the virtual Web-based museum. Each room consists of a view over the information contained in those single or interrelated resources. The information exhibited in each room is described by an ontology, written in OWL. We also discuss the approach used to take advantage of a combination of structural and semantic information to efficiently retrieve documents from the MEC collection. Both approaches can be automatised to allow a very systematic way to deal with the huge and rich museum assets.