LOD4Culture: Easy exploration of cultural heritage linked open data

Abstract

LOD4Culture is a web application that exploits Cultural Heritage Linked Open Data for tourism and education purposes. Since target users are not fluid on Semantic Web technologies, the user interface is designed to hide the intricacies of RDF or SPARQL. An interactive map is provided for exploring world-wide Cultural Heritage sites that can be filtered by type and that uses cluster markers to adapt the view to different zoom levels. LOD4Culture also includes a Cultural Heritage entity browser that builds comprehensive visualizations of sites, artists, and artworks. All data exchanges are facilitated through the use of a generator of REST APIs over Linked Open Data that translates API calls into SPARQL queries across multiple sources, including Wikidata and DBpedia. Since March 2022, more than 1.7K users have employed LOD4Culture. The application has been mentioned many times in social media and has been featured in the DBpedia Newsletter, in the list of Wikidata tools for visualizing data, and in the open data applications list of datos.gob.es.