heritage Review A Survey of Geospatial Semantic Web for Cultural Heritage Ikrom Nishanbaev 1,* , Erik Champion 1 and David A. McMeekin 2 1 School of Media, Creative Arts, and Social Inquiry, Curtin University, Perth, WA 6845, Australia;
[email protected] 2 School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Curtin University, Perth, WA 6845, Australia;
[email protected] * Correspondence:
[email protected] Received: 23 April 2019; Accepted: 16 May 2019; Published: 20 May 2019 Abstract: The amount of digital cultural heritage data produced by cultural heritage institutions is growing rapidly. Digital cultural heritage repositories have therefore become an efficient and effective way to disseminate and exploit digital cultural heritage data. However, many digital cultural heritage repositories worldwide share technical challenges such as data integration and interoperability among national and regional digital cultural heritage repositories. The result is dispersed and poorly-linked cultured heritage data, backed by non-standardized search interfaces, which thwart users’ attempts to contextualize information from distributed repositories. A recently introduced geospatial semantic web is being adopted by a great many new and existing digital cultural heritage repositories to overcome these challenges. However, no one has yet conducted a conceptual survey of the geospatial semantic web concepts for a cultural heritage audience. A conceptual survey of these concepts pertinent to the cultural heritage field is, therefore, needed. Such a survey equips cultural heritage professionals and practitioners with an overview of all the necessary tools, and free and open source semantic web and geospatial semantic web platforms that can be used to implement geospatial semantic web-based cultural heritage repositories.