Many-to-many. Usability challenges of entity reconciliation in art history and photographic studies

2026-01-20

Journal of Documentation

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenges of many-to-many matching, data ambiguity, and inconsistency arising from heterogeneous cross-cultural institutional records in art history and photographic research. Taking the PHAROS consortium as a case study, it proposes an entity alignment framework that explicitly models uncertainty by integrating institutional cataloging traditions and data granularity. Through case analyses, workflow evaluations, and semantic modeling, the approach incorporates strategies such as anonymous entities, umbrella terms, and uncertainty qualifiers to effectively manage complex alignment scenarios. The research reveals the prevalence of non-one-to-one relationships among cultural heritage entities and distills practical alignment guidelines tailored to the domain. These contributions provide both theoretical grounding and actionable methodologies for cross-institutional data integration, supporting the development of more robust, interoperable, and sustainable cultural heritage infrastructures.

Technology Category

• Constraint Satisfaction and Optimization: Distributed CSP/Optimization
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Linked Open Data, Knowledge Graphs & KB Completion

Application Category

• Semantics and Knowledge: Provenance, trust, security and privacy, and ethical issues in managing semantic data
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data integration and cleaning

Abstract

This article investigates challenges in reconciling heterogeneous records across cultural institutions, focusing on art historical photo archives within the PHAROS association. Through case studies, the study analyses reconciliation workflows and cataloguing traditions, with attention to institutional contexts, data granularities and modelling strategies. Reconciliation is seldom a one-to-one operation. Ambiguities, incomplete data, shifting attributions and varying practices shape outcomes. Strategies observed include the creation of anonymous or collective entities, the use of umbrella terms, the addition of uncertainty qualifiers and reticence when ambiguity cannot be resolved. Insights from PHAROS provide guidance for designing more robust, interoperable and sustainable cultural heritage infrastructures. The article highlights the need to model uncertainty explicitly, offering a framework that connects technical reconciliation methods with institutional practices.

Problem

• entity reconciliation
• cultural heritage
• art history
• photographic archives
• data interoperability

Innovation

• entity reconciliation
• uncertainty modeling
• cultural heritage data
• many-to-many matching
• interoperability