Towards a robust framework for the semantic representation of temporal expressions in cultural legacy data

Date and time descriptors play an important role in cultural record keeping. As part of digital access and information retrieval on heritage databases it is becoming increasingly important that date descriptors are not matched as strings but that their semantics are properly understood and interpreted by man and machine alike. This paper describes a prototype system designed to resolve temporal expressions from English language cultural heritage records to ISO 8601 compatible date expressions. The architecture we advocate calls for a two stage resolution with a “semantic layer” between the input and ISO 8601 output. The system is inspired by a similar system for German language records and was tested on real world data from the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. Results from an evaluation with two senior art and metadata experts from the gallery are reported.