Enhancing Metadata Management through Linked Data Models
Lennert Van de Velde Miel Vander Sande Milan Valadou
Meemoo, the Flemish institute for archives, preserves over 6 million primarily audiovisual objects of more than 180 organizations across cultural heritage, media and government sectors. Metadata plays a key role across all of our processes, from preservation to enabling dissemination through search. Hence, improving the accessibility and management of metadata are crucial activities of our operations, in particular with the ever-growing scale in volume and heterogeneity. To this end, meemoo is currently evolving towards a Knowledge Graph-based infrastructure. In this poster, we present our new set of data models that support this endeavor.

The meemoo data models have a layered design, with a core model that is applicable across media objects from various types accompanied by a number of domain-specific models that cover different use cases. They were developed using an iterative methodology to design, implement, and evaluate data models with internal and external stakeholders. The core Objects model builds upon PREMIS (OWL) and is used to  model the main structure of the media objects, which identifies the preserved intellectual entity, its representations, its files, and the way they relate. The domain models complement the core model and include, among others, models to describe the media contents (Descriptive model), information about the partners that own the material (Organizations model), and digitization or provenance metadata (Events model). 

The different data models are implemented using a combination of RDFS and SHACL to ensure a smooth integration in the Knowledge Graph infrastructure. The use of RDF-based standards adds greater flexibility and enhances the models’ semantic clarity. Each resource and relationship can be explicitly modeled, identified, defined and labeled, while promoting reuse through Linked Open Data. In addition, it also provides machine-readability to support automation, which enables us to automatically generate documentation or a GraphQL schema from the SHACL source files. 

Our poster illustrates the data models, the design methodology and how the data models are used across meemoo in various applications and with different purposes. Both documentation and sources are available on [our developer documentation website][1].


  [1]: https://developer.meemoo.be/docs/metadata/knowledge-graph/
metadata standards and implementation from document to data