LOD4Culture: Easy Exploration of Cultural Heritage Linked Open Data

Tracking #: 3358-4572

Authors: 
Guillermo Vega-Gorgojo

Responsible editor: 
Guest Editors Interactive SW 2022

Submission type: 
Application Report
Abstract: 
LOD4Culture is a web application that exploits Cultural Heritage Linked Open Data for tourism and education purposes. Since target users are not fluid on Semantic Web technologies, the user interface is designed to hide the intricacies of RDF or SPARQL. An interactive map is provided for exploring world-wide Cultural Heritage sites that can be filtered by type and that uses cluster markers to adapt the view to different zoom levels. LOD4Culture also includes a Cultural Heritage entity browser that builds comprehensive visualization of sites, artists, and artworks. All data exchanges are facilitated through the use of a generator of REST APIs over Linked Open Data that translates API calls into SPARQL queries across multiple sources, including Wikidata and DBpedia. Since March 2022, more than 1.5K users have employed LOD4Culture. The application has been mentioned many times in social media and has been featured in the DBpedia Newsletter, in the list of Wikidata tools for visualizing data, and in the open data applications list of datos.gob.es.
Full PDF Version: 
Tags: 
Reviewed

Decision/Status: 
Accept

Solicited Reviews:
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Review #1
By Fouad Zablith submitted on 24/Mar/2023
Suggestion:
Minor Revision
Review Comment:

The revised paper was greatly improved and addresses all the comments I have raised.

Just a minor point concerning the requirements analysis of the tools comment, I suggest to add to the main paper some of the information you provided in the "answers" file, where more details were available when you mention that "We can trace the origin of it from our previous work in the topic of LOD-based question generation...." This provides further justifications for the design of the features (e.g., interactivity, hiding RDF complexity, etc.)

All the best.

Review #2
Anonymous submitted on 09/May/2023
Suggestion:
Minor Revision
Review Comment:

Authors have addressed almost all previous comments successfully. Then only point I'm not completely convinced about is the fact that it is claimed from the beginning that the application can serve for educational purposes as it has not been tested in such way. I read the comments about the potential to be used for educational purposes but as there are no proves of such use case, I would recommend authors to leave that for discussion and probably propose it as future work.