Management and retrieval of cultural heritage multimedia collection using ontology

Cultural heritage objects can be found everywhere, whether in heritage institutions (i.e. Library, Archive and Museum) or other sources. Since the cultural heritage has outstanding values to mankind, it is important for us to preserve and benefited its values. The challenging task is that the heritage collection is provided in digital format; have different type of media (i.e. text, image, video, audio and animation); and stored in scattered locations. This paper introduces ontology-based approach in management and retrieval cultural heritage multimedia collection. The goal is to enable the integration of different type of heritage media and to retrieve relevant heritage media to a given query in any type of media. In order to do this, the cultural heritage ontology is developed based on the World Heritage Classification provided by UNESCO/WHC. The ontology also included media classification to accommodate the heterogeneous nature of multimedia collection. The retrieval task is done using SPARQL query language. The result shows that all type of relevant heritage media can be retrieved and the number of retrieved non-relevant media is relatively low.