Building the semantic layer of the Józef Piłsudski digital archive with an ontology-based approach

Using semantic web technologies is becoming an efficient way to overcome metadata storage and data integration problems in digital archives, thus enhancing the accuracy of the search process and leading to the retrieval of more relevant results. In this paper, the results of the implementation of the semantic layer of the Józef Piłsudski Institute of America digital archive are presented. In order to represent and integrate data about the archival collections housed by the institute, the authors developed arkivo, an ontology that accommodates the archival description of records but also provides a reference schema for publishing linked data. The authors describe the application of arkivo to the digitized archival collections of the institute, with emphasis on how these resources have been linked to external datasets in the linked data cloud. They also show the results of an experiment focused on the query answering task involving a state-of-the-art triple store system. The dataset related to the Piłsudski Institute archival collections has been made available for ontology benchmarking purposes.