Heterogeneous archives
This case study does not really focus on a particular organisation or partnership. Rather, the reverse is the case: nearly every organisation – within and outside of the RNA project – is involved in one way or the other.
Heterogeneous archives often involve large archives or various collections that contain material of such a dissimilar nature that uniform description models and knowledge-sharing strategies do not offer any solution.
For example, the collections of Naturalis, its partner organisations, the RACM and the organisations in the province of Groningen are all partners in the RNA projects. Another example is the collection Beeld & Geluid (Images & Sound) of the Rotterdam Municipal Archive, which apart from photos, negatives and movies also consists of websites, radio and television recordings.
The Elektronisch Depot (Electronic Depot or E-Depot) of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (Royal Dutch Library) comprises heterogeneous archives containing information that must be shared. On the one hand, there are all sorts of reference structures that contain specialist terminology related to a particular knowledge domain (thesauri, ontologies, taxonomies, keyword lists, etc.). These are used to structure the knowledge related to a particular domain and must be updated, expanded and reorganised continuously. On the other hand, an increasing flow of texts that are available electronically (articles, reports, books, web pages, log book entries) must be opened up with the vocabulary from the reference structure.
Among other things, the RNA project uses language technology in an attempt to manage the reference structures and expand these with new concepts, and to link new texts to the concepts of the reference structures in an efficient way.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007