A semantically annotated JSON metadata structure for open linked cultural data in Neo4j

Digital culture is a mainstay of the emerging 6V era as both the digitization of existing cultural data and the creation of original native digital cultural content directly lead to the generation of large data volumes which may well be bursty, unstructured or semi-structured, and inherently multimodal. One way to address the increased complexity associated with 6V data is to create metadata structures which succinctly summarize a segment of the underlying cultural data, add semantic information, and serve as indexing and clustering points. This conference paper proposes a JSON description for cultural items which is tailored to the needs of the digital culture domain, generic enough to summarize the vast majority of cultural items, and flexible enough to be extended should the need arise. Moreover, it supports by construction multilevel clustering, semantic annotations, and links to and from relevant cultural items. As a concrete example, the proposed description has been imported to an instance of a Neo4j graph database. The latter takes full advantage of the capabilities offered by the proposed JSON metadata structure, especially the dynamic directed linking between similar cultural items. The abovementioned Neo4j is populated with cultural items from the Ionian Islands, a Greek region with rich cultural tradition.