The VRA Core Application Profile for Searching and Presenting Cultural Heritage: the MultimediaN Case

In this paper we describe the usage of the VRA metadata schema in converting, searching through, presenting and navigating cultural heritage collections in RDF. We use the MultimediaN demonstrator as illustration. Our research question is how to represent heterogeneous metadata collections in RDF for usage in generic semantic search, navigation and presentation features, while preserving the original data as closely as possible. We investigate possible approaches to conversion of the data that will fulfill the application’s needs, and found that a representation of three schema levels is most useful. We call these the collection-specific, domain-specific and generic levels. The domain-specific level abstracts from individual collections, but is more specific than domain-independent, generic schemas such as Dublin Core. An existing specification called VRA Core 3.0 suited our need for a domain-specific schema, so we developed an Application Profile for it, focusing mainly on the Description Set Profile. In the process we developed an RDF schema for VRA Core and used OWL Restrictions to indicate expected value ranges.