Language Independent Searching Tools for Cultural Heritage on the QueryLab Platform

The paper describes the tools for searching and visualizing local and web inventories related to intangible and tangible cultural heritage in the QueryLab platform. The pandemic outbreak has made more evident the need to offer users tools to query and enjoy interesting and educative websites by their homes. The tools presented are useful for users who are not experts in the domain of the inventories, offering predefined queries and semantic query expansion to interact with the archives. The visual suggestions, in the form of word clouds of the tags of the selected archives, help in querying the archives and retrieving the elements that come closest to the user's interests. As one of the QueryLab aims is to continue to add inventories, in the languages they are stored, visual suggestions help to overcome the language distance between the archives and the users to allow an easy and successful interaction. This paper presents QueryLab tools for searching, browsing, and displaying multimedia data, with some preliminary results.