Describing and Linking Cultural Semantic Content by Using Situations and Actions

Ontologies have been used to describe cultural objects, such as artifacts, by their physical or media specific properties, or by the life cycle of the objects in collections. In contrast, this paper discusses the problem of creating ontological descriptions that allow describing different kinds of cultural content through the situations and actions that take place in the real world. This point of view is important when semantic metadata is used as a basis for creating intelligent, educational, and entertaining linking of content on the semantic web. The idea is addressed not only in theory but by presenting the first prototype implementation of a cross-domain semantic portal “CultureSampo—Finnish Culture on the Semantic Web”. This system is able to automatically link together different kind of cultural resources in meaningful ways with explanations. The content types considered include paintings, artifacts, photographs, videos, cultural processes, and stories .