Biographical relations of cultural heritage in EDM model: a proposal for integration of collections about Oswaldo Cruz

Abstract

The diffusion of digital objects of cultural heritage on the Internet has challenged institutions, which deal with documents identified within this conception, to measure the best ways to organize and disseminate this information on the web. The Semantic Web technologies and Linked Data principles have been pointed as facilitators for this action, providing forms of thematic interconnection. In this way, the opportunity to work biographical aspects between digital objects, through the Europeana Data Model (EDM) and vocabulary reuse, is the objective of this work. For this, a restrictive and illustrative, non-exhaustive case study was made, with documents about the scientist Oswaldo Cruz, pioneer in the study of infectious and parasitic diseases and experimental medicine in Brazil. From the EDM representation of the selected resources, it was inferred curatorial relationships of the biographical aspects between the items, which had the semantics identified among the descriptors of some vocabularies established in the context of related data. Thus it was possible to verify and analyze how the Linked Data principles can extend data semantics, linking objects thematically, thus gaining a chance to be exploited by original forms of discovery and reuse on the Internet.