Exploring Semantic Archival Collections: The Case of Piłsudski Institute of America

Over the last decades, a huge amount of available digital collections have been published on the Web, opening up new possibilities for solving old questions and posing new ones. However, finding pertinent information in archives often is not an easy task. Semantic Web technologies are rapidly changing the archival research by providing a way to formally describe archival documents. In this paper, we present the activities employed in building the semantic layer of the Piłsudski Institute of America digital archive. In order to accommodate the description of archival documents as well as historical references contained in these, we used the arkivo ontology, which aims at providing a reference schema for publishing Linked Data. Finally, we present some query examples that meet the domain experts’ information needs.