Enriching and Publishing Cultural Heritage as Linked Open Data

In the last decade, a lot of effort has been put by the cultural community around the world into digitization and aggregation activities. The main outcome of these was the development of portals like Europeana, DPLA, DigitalNZ, and National Library of Australia, which are collecting and providing access to the public digitized cultural assets from Europe, America, New Zealand, and Australia, respectively. Their main objective, however, is not only to bring the public closer to culture but also to efficiently represent information about cultural objects that will make them useful to various target groups like teachers, students, and developers by also permitting their creative reuse. The best practice for fulfilling this requirement is the publication of such information according to the Linked Open Data (LOD) principles. In this chapter, we present the tools developed and the methodology adopted through the participation of our group in aggregation activities for enriching and publishing cultural heritage as Linked Open Data.