A Framework for Improved Access to Museum Databases in the Semantic Web

Digital museum databases have extremely heterogeneous data structures which require advanced mapping and vocabulary integration for them to benefit from the interoperability enabled by semantic technologies. In addition to establishing ways of extracting and manipulating digitally encoded cultural material, there exists a need to make this material available and accessible to human users in different forms and languages that are available to them. In this paper we describe a method to manage and access museum data by integrating it within a series of interlinked ontological models. The method allows querying and generation of query results in natural language. We report on the results of applying this method from experiments we have been pursuing.