Hierarchical structuring of Cultural Heritage objects within large aggregations

TL;DR

This paper presents a scalable hierarchical clustering method for organizing large collections of digitized cultural heritage objects, improving user navigation and discovery in digital libraries.

Contribution

It introduces a fast, scalable clustering algorithm with automated field selection for semantic grouping of cultural objects at multiple similarity levels.

Findings

Effective clustering on UK and Europeana datasets

Improved semantic organization of cultural content

Scalable approach suitable for large digital libraries

Abstract

Huge amounts of cultural content have been digitised and are available through digital libraries and aggregators like Europeana.eu. However, it is not easy for a user to have an overall picture of what is available nor to find related objects. We propose a method for hier- archically structuring cultural objects at different similarity levels. We describe a fast, scalable clustering algorithm with an automated field selection method for finding semantic clusters. We report a qualitative evaluation on the cluster categories based on records from the UK and a quantitative one on the results from the complete Europeana dataset.