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In the domain of cultural heritage, a lot of archives and data collections already exist. Thus, one of the main challenges for curators and archivists in this domain consists of exchanging data with other archives and integrating similar collections. Typical usage scenarios in this area can only be realized by semantically integrating all available data sources. Therefore, the main task of semantic integration consists of bridging the different levels of heterogeneity. Semantic Web technologies might be a solution for these challenges. Ontology Matching, for example, is already successfully applied for bridging some of the heterogeneity types. However, it is not suitable for dissolving heterogeneity conflicts at all levels due to unsatisfactory matching qualities. Still, matching is crucial for the semantic integration success of the distributed data sources. As a result, a main part in semantic integration is still done manually by domain experts. It would be preferable to support their work by at least semi-automatic techniques.In addition, a huge amount of standard vocabularies and taxonomies, which are commonly used, already exist in the domain of cultural heritage. Their automatic matching and corresponding resolving of heterogeneities between them by appropriate mappings could facilitate semantic integration. Selecting and applying fitting prevalent vocabularies and taxonomies could ease these efforts. Furthermore, standards for archives exist even on the conceptual level and their application supports digital archives in their main tasks.The book chapter describes typical usage scenarios in the domain of cultural heritage archives and discusses the use of Semantic Web technologies to implement these scenarios. In addition, commonly used standards and vocabularies in this area are presented and ways to integrate these standards are discussed.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-662-55433-3_15

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