Canadian Heritage Information Network - Customer Case Study

The Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN) is part of Patrimoine Canada Heritage (PCH), the Canadian ministry of culture. CHIN is the Canadian national aggregator for cultural heritage, gathering information from over 500 museums and galleries. CHIN’s intention was to redevelop their aggregator based on Linked Open Data as an approach to enhance access to Canadian cultural and heritage collections for researchers and the public. Ontotext provided technology innovation consulting, including an environment scan of relevant projects, ontologies, datasets and tools as well as a review of CHIN’s LOD pilot, a 4-year strategy, etc. The aim was not only to provide users with comprehensive information about a certain artefact, but also to serve links to other data that might not have been apparent to the user. Ontotext has also participated in analyzing the current Artefacts Canada collection for data quality problems, matchability of key fields against established thesauri, statistics on coverage of key fields per collection, etc.