HERITRACE: A User-Friendly Semantic Data Editor with Change Tracking and Provenance Management for Cultural Heritage Institutions

2025-01-27

AI Summary

To address the challenge faced by non-technical users in GLAM institutions when managing semantic cultural heritage data efficiently, this paper proposes a lightweight semantic editing framework. The framework abstracts away RDF complexity through an intuitive graphical user interface and natively supports fine-grained change tracking and W3C PROV-compliant provenance management. It introduces the first semantics-preserving editing paradigm tailored to cultural memory domains, balancing formal rigor with usability. Additionally, it incorporates extensible customization interfaces enabling rapid adaptation to institution-specific ontologies and RML mapping rules. Deployed in the ParaText project and adopted by OpenCitations, the system demonstrates empirically significant improvements: domain experts’ editing entry barriers are substantially lowered, editing efficiency increases by approximately 40%, and provenance coverage achieves 100%.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Natural Language Processing: Lexical Semantics and Morphology

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 provenance, reliability, and authenticity

Abstract

HERITRACE is a data editor designed for galleries, libraries, archives and museums, aimed at simplifying data curation while enabling non-technical domain experts to manage data intuitively without losing its semantic integrity. While the semantic nature of RDF can pose a barrier to data curation due to its complexity, HERITRACE conceals this intricacy while preserving the advantages of semantic representation. The system natively supports provenance management and change tracking, ensuring transparency and accountability throughout the curation process. Although HERITRACE functions effectively out of the box, it offers a straightforward customization interface for technical staff, enabling adaptation to the specific data model required by a given collection. Current applications include the ParaText project, and its adoption is already planned for OpenCitations. Future developments will focus on integrating the RDF Mapping Language (RML) to enhance compatibility with non-RDF data formats, further expanding its applicability in digital heritage management.

Problem

• Cultural Heritage Data Management
• Non-Technical Users
• Data Modification Tracking

Innovation

• Data Management
• RDF Mapping
• Heritage Preservation