From Silos to Semantics: A Multimodal, Rights-Aware Ecosystem for Cultural Heritage
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Digital Cultural Heritage (CH) is currently hindered by fragmented repositories and data silos. To address this, the REEVALUATE project presents a comprehensive framework for interoperability and reuse. We introduce the CACAO ontology, which integrates CIDOC-CRM with ODRL to model granular rights, serving as the backbone for the ArtKB (16 million statements). To tackle manual curation costs, we developed an LLM-based agent that automates the extraction of structured knowledge from unstructured text. Furthermore, we empower users with a multimodal retrieval system that combines CLIP-based visual search with structured querying, alongside a graph-based recommender. This ecosystem democratizes Knowledge Graph creation and enables complex, rights-aware discovery and reuse across European collections.
Authors: Peeters, Ruben, Duan, Xuemin, Dimou, Anastasia
Institutions: Flanders Make (Belgium), KU Leuven
Language: English
Topic: Semantic Web and Ontologies
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7155089368