Thomas Steiner, PhD

Unstructured metadata fields such as ‘description’ offer tremendous value for users to understand cultural heritage objects. However, this type of narrative information is of little direct use within a machine-readable context due to its unstructured nature. This article explores the possibilities and limitations of named-entity recognition (NER) and term extraction (TE) to mine such unstructured metadata for meaningful concepts. These concepts can be used to leverage otherwise limited… Show more

Unstructured metadata fields such as ‘description’ offer tremendous value for users to understand cultural heritage objects. However, this type of narrative information is of little direct use within a machine-readable context due to its unstructured nature. This article explores the possibilities and limitations of named-entity recognition (NER) and term extraction (TE) to mine such unstructured metadata for meaningful concepts. These concepts can be used to leverage otherwise limited searching and browsing operations, but they can also play an important role to foster Digital Humanities research. To catalyze experimentation with NER and TE, the article proposes an evaluation of the performance of three third-party entity extraction services through a comprehensive case study, based on the descriptive fields of the Smithsonian Cooper–Hewitt National Design Museum in New York. To cover both NER and TE, we first offer a quantitative analysis of named entities retrieved by the services in terms of precision and recall compared with a manually annotated gold-standard corpus, and then complement this approach with a more qualitative assessment of relevant terms extracted. Based on the outcomes of this double analysis, the conclusions present the added value of entity extraction services, but also indicate the dangers of uncritically using NER and/or TE, and by extension Linked Data principles, within the Digital Humanities. All metadata and tools used within the article are freely available, making it possible for researchers and practitioners to repeat the methodology. By doing so, the article offers a significant contribution towards understanding the value of entity recognition and disambiguation for the Digital Humanities. Show less

Unstructured metadata fields such as ‘description’ offer tremendous value for users to understand cultural heritage objects. However, this type of narrative information is of little direct use within a machine-readable context due to its unstructured nature. This article explores the possibilities and limitations of named-entity recognition (NER) and term extraction (TE) to mine such unstructured metadata for meaningful concepts. These concepts can be used to leverage otherwise limited… Show more

Unstructured metadata fields such as ‘description’ offer tremendous value for users to understand cultural heritage objects. However, this type of narrative information is of little direct use within a machine-readable context due to its unstructured nature. This article explores the possibilities and limitations of named-entity recognition (NER) and term extraction (TE) to mine such unstructured metadata for meaningful concepts. These concepts can be used to leverage otherwise limited searching and browsing operations, but they can also play an important role to foster Digital Humanities research. To catalyze experimentation with NER and TE, the article proposes an evaluation of the performance of three third-party entity extraction services through a comprehensive case study, based on the descriptive fields of the Smithsonian Cooper–Hewitt National Design Museum in New York. To cover both NER and TE, we first offer a quantitative analysis of named entities retrieved by the services in terms of precision and recall compared with a manually annotated gold-standard corpus, and then complement this approach with a more qualitative assessment of relevant terms extracted. Based on the outcomes of this double analysis, the conclusions present the added value of entity extraction services, but also indicate the dangers of uncritically using NER and/or TE, and by extension Linked Data principles, within the Digital Humanities. All metadata and tools used within the article are freely available, making it possible for researchers and practitioners to repeat the methodology. By doing so, the article offers a significant contribution towards understanding the value of entity recognition and disambiguation for the Digital Humanities. Show less

Many have left their footprints on the field of semantic RESTful Web service description. Albeit some of the propositions are even W3C Recommendations, none of the proposed standards could gain significant adoption with Web service providers. Some approaches were supposedly too complex and verbose, others were considered not RESTful, and some failed to reach a significant majority of API providers for a combination of the reasons above. While we neither have the silver bullet for universal Web… Show more

Many have left their footprints on the field of semantic RESTful Web service description. Albeit some of the propositions are even W3C Recommendations, none of the proposed standards could gain significant adoption with Web service providers. Some approaches were supposedly too complex and verbose, others were considered not RESTful, and some failed to reach a significant majority of API providers for a combination of the reasons above. While we neither have the silver bullet for universal Web service description, with this paper, we want to suggest a lightweight approach called RESTdesc. It expresses the semantics of Web services by pre- and postconditions in simple N3 rules, and integrates existing standards and conventions such as Link headers, HTTP OPTIONS, and URI templates for discovery and interaction. This approach keeps the complexity to a minimum, yet still enables service descriptions with full semantic expressiveness. A sample implementation on the topic of multimedia Web services verifies the effectiveness of our approach. Show less

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