EVENT REPORT

Report on the 2nd Linked Archives International
Workshop (LinkedArchives 2022) at TPDL 2022
Carla Teixeira Lopes

Cristina Ribeiro

University of Porto/INESC TEC
Portugal

University of Porto/INESC TEC
Portugal

ctl@fe.up.pt

mcr@fe.up.pt

Franco Niccolucci
PIN - Servizi Didattici e Scientifici per l’Università di Firenze scrl
Italyfranco.niccolucci@gmail.com

Marı́a Poveda-VillalónNuno Freire

Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
Spain

ROSSIO Infrastructure, NOVA FCSH
Portugalmpoveda@fi.upm.es

nunofreire@fcsh.unl.pt

Abstract
The 2nd edition of the International Workshop on Archives and Linked Data ran in conjunction with the 26th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries(TPDL 2022). TPDL 2022 was an in-person event in Padua with an online-only registration
for non-speakers. Archives, the guardians of large volumes of historical and current information, are showing a growing interest in linked data and semantic web technologies. These
technologies can be used to link archives’ information with data from other cultural heritage
institutions and more informal sources. In a world of linked data, users can access richer
interfaces where the archival records are available in their context, with explicit metadata.
The workshop gathered about 20 researchers and specialists engaged in initiatives crossing
linked data technologies, archives, and cultural heritage in general, discussing advances andchallenges in this area. The workshop was a successful event, with active participation in thediscussions that followed the presentations. The participants found the workshop interesting(40%) or extremely interesting (60%), and everyone who answered a post-workshop survey
would be interested in another edition of the workshop.
Date: 20 September, 2022.
Website: https://linkedarchives.inesctec.pt/.

ACM SIGIR Forum

1

Vol. 56 No. 2 December 2022

1

Introduction

Cultural Heritage deals with treasures that are expected to survive generations. Many digital
initiatives have explored segments of this global asset, with much more to uncover. They tend to
be oriented by the organizations that have traditionally curated these valuable objects: libraries,
museums, and archives.
The Linked Archives International Workshop started from the perspective of archives, theguardians of immense volumes of historical and current information driven by the need to keep arecord of our past processes, achievements, and results. The growing interest in archival records
and the availability of technologies that can take large volumes of data and process them leadsarchives into the world of linked data. In this vision, the archives’ information is joined withdata from other cultural heritage institutions and more informal sources. Later, users can explore
archives in rich interfaces where the data are available in their context, with explicit metadata.
The two editions of the workshop were sponsored by a Portuguese national project, EPISA—
Entity and Property Inference for Semantic Archives1 , a collaboration between two university
groups and Torre do Tombo, the Portuguese National Archives. The project is experimenting
with models and prototypes for archival information systems based on linked data and ready forthe semantic web. As the elements of the project team made contact with organizations and groups
with similar interests, they perceived the need to discuss models, technologies, and infrastructures.
TPDL 2021 presented the opportunity to do this in a European-centred community. The 1stedition of the workshop was a success, with over 20 submissions. Nearly 90 people attended, andmost of the contributions are published as CEUR proceedings [Lopes et al., 2022].
TPDL 2022 welcomed the 2nd edition of the International Workshop on Archives and Linked
Data.

2

Organization

The workshop aimed to gather researchers and specialists engaged in initiatives that cross Archives
and the Semantic Web and those planning similar efforts in other cultural heritage organizations.
We adopted an interdisciplinary point of view, to stimulate the dialogue between the technicallyoriented communities, researchers from the digital humanities, and specialists from cultural heritage institutions.
The organizers invited 33 scholars and specialists to join the members of the Organising Committee in the Program Committee. Three members of the Program Committee reviewed each
paper, and each member reviewed, at most, one paper.
The number of submissions (8) was lower than in the previous edition. Two reasons may havecontributed to this reduction, the move from an online event to an in-person one (initially, remoteparticipation was not being considered by TPDL 2022) and the existence of a simultaneous event
having the same target audience, the conference of the International Council on Archives. Six ofthe eight papers were accepted, two as short and four as full papers.
The workshop was a half-day event that started with a keynote by Kerstin Arnold from theArchives Portal Europe Foundation entitled “No Archive is an Island – A Tale of Exploring a Brave1

http://episa.inesctec.pt/

ACM SIGIR Forum2

Vol. 56 No. 2 December 2022

New World”. We organized the six papers in three blocks according to their main focus: Artificial
Intelligence and Archives, Infrastructures for Archives and Linked Data, and Models for Linked
Archives. All the papers were assigned a 15-minutes presentation followed by a question-answeringand discussion period.
After the workshop, we published the slides of the presentations on the workshop’s webpage.
Contributions are published in the TPDL 2022 proceedings for the Workshops and Doctoral
Consortium [Candela and Silvello, 2022].
The call for papers announced that extended versions of the best papers would be selected tobe published in the ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH). After a second
round of reviews by the Organising Committee, the authors of one paper were invited to submit
an extended version to the journal.

3

Participation

Four countries are associated with the accepted submissions, as seen in Figure 1, and European
countries predominate. Note that submissions with contributions from more than one country arecounted for each involved country. There was one submission with authors from both the United
Kingdom and Italy.

Figure 1: Number of accepted submissions per country.
An analysis of the institutions associated with the accepted submissions shows that, fromthe six institutions, 5 (83%) were Higher Education Institutions. One of the institutions (22%)
was a national archive. The United Kingdom National Archives and the University of Minho werealready present in the previous edition of the workshop. The institutions associated with acceptedsubmissions are presented in Table 1.
Table 2 identifies two research projects associated with the accepted submissions. Both projects
are also associated with works presented in the 1st edition of the workshop, although by different
authors.
Two authors have presented works in both editions of the workshop.
ACM SIGIR Forum

3

Vol. 56 No. 2 December 2022

Table 1: Institutions associated with accepted submissions.
Name
CountryType
The National Archives
United Kingdom
Archives
University College of London
United Kingdom
Higher Education
University of Alberta
CanadaHigher Education
University of Minho
Portugal
Higher Education
University of Pisa
Italy
Higher Education
University of Porto
Portugal
Higher Education

Acronym/Name
EPISA
Project Omega

Table 2: Projects associated with the submissions.
Title/Short Description
Countries
Entity and Property Inference for Semantic Archives Portugal
Towards a single pan-archival linked data catalogue United Kingdom

As there was no registration for this specific workshop, we conducted a post-workshop survey
to estimate the number of participants and their level of satisfaction with the workshop. We
had approximately 15 people physically present and about seven attending online. 40% of thein-person and 40% of the remote participants have not attended other sessions in TPDL 2022,
which shows a specific interest in the topics of the workshop.
In the post-workshop survey, participants evaluated the workshop as interesting (40%) or
extremely interesting (60%), and everyone showed interest in another edition of the workshop.
One of the participants said it would be good to know in advance who presents remotely, andanother said it would be beneficial to have the papers, or at least their abstracts, available before
the workshop.

4

KeynoteKerstin Arnold, the Chief Operating Officer of the Archives Portal Europe2 , started the workshop with her presentation entitled “No Archive is an Island—A Tale of Exploring a Brave New
World” [Arnold, 2022]. Contrary to the original plan, the presentation was delivered remotely due
to Kerstin’s inability to travel.
Kerstin discussed the importance of linking archives and presented the development and current
status of Archives Portal Europe. In this context, Kerstin talked about the role of standardization
on archives inter-connection, discussed several types of standardization, and described the role ofaggregation and joint access points. To wrap up, Kerstin reflected on the appearance of the new
Records in Context standard and other initiatives such as the Common European Data Space forCultural Heritage.
The recording of the keynote presentation is available on the workshop’s webpage.
2

http://www.archivesportaleurope.net

ACM SIGIR Forum

4

Vol. 56 No. 2 December 2022

5

Contributions

Contributions were organized into three blocks of presentations according to the nature of theircontent.

5.1

Artificial Intelligence and Archives

This session had two presentations on the application of artificial intelligence for information
extraction in archival data: one on archival finding aids and another on digitized archival materials.
The research by Luis Filipe Cunha and José Carlos Ramalho approaches the problem of Named
Entity Recognition (NER) in the Portuguese language [Cunha and Ramalho, 2022]. The authors
started from a pre-trained Bidirectional Encoding Representation from Transformers (BERT)
model for the Portuguese vocabulary and adapted it for NER. The resulting model was comparedwith an earlier model by the authors, and it improved F1-score. The authors also present a tool
for annotating named entities in textual corpora, in which the NER model supports the processof annotation by the end user.
An ongoing project addressing the description of archival descriptions assisted by artificial
intelligence was presented by Mariana Dias and Carla Teixeira Lopes [Dias and Lopes, 2022].
The system aims to assist the archivist by applying Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on thearchival materials, followed by NER to identify the main concepts in the text. The extracted
concepts are then used to populate an ontology. The project has already trained a NER modelusing a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Network with a Conditional Random Field Layer(BiLSTM-CRF) Neural Network model and pre-trained contextual string embeddings. Ongoingwork is populating the ontology based on programmed mapping and instantiation rules for therecognized concepts. The project uses the ArchOnto ontology from the EPISA project, but theauthors indicate that their approach can be generalized to other linked data models.

5.2

Infrastructures for Archives and Linked Data

This session has two presentations about infrastructural frameworks: one for traditional archives
and another for web archives.
The first presentation addressed the problem of content drift detection from the perspectiveof web archives. Content drift occurs when a website’s content changes and moves away from its
original topic. Brenda Reyes Ayala, Qiufeng Du, and Juyi Han presented a method for detecting
content drift on the live web-based on title comparison [Ayala et al., 2022]. The authors use
cosine similarity on the titles of live websites and their corresponding archived versions. Theyevaluated their method in three web archive collections manually checked for content drift, andtheir approach achieved an F-measure of 90.7.
The ongoing development of an infrastructure for integrating linked data in the archival management process was presented by Sérgio Nunes, Tiago Silva, Cláudia Martins, and Rita Peixoto[Nunes et al., 2022]. The authors presented the technological architecture of the infrastructure,
which is based on RDF data, and an overview of its workflows. The use cases for archival professionals addressed by the infrastructure are searching, browsing, and archival management andACM SIGIR Forum

5

Vol. 56 No. 2 December 2022

these include abstractions for working with linked data. Although the infrastructure is experimental, its functionality is currently under evaluation by archival professionals.

5.3

Models for Linked Archives

This session had two presentations on semantic models in archives: one proposing an extensionof the Records in Context Ontology (RiC-O) and another evaluating a semantic model with thesupport of archival professionals.
Daria Mikhaylova and Daniele Metilli were motivated by the information needs of architects
regarding architectural archives and proposed an extension of the RiC-O that is specifically designed for architectural archival records [Mikhaylova and Metilli, 2022]. The authors presented
the design of their ontology, focusing on how it models the architectural project, its different
phases, and the specific types of records that are found in an architectural archive. The authors
also presented and discussed the application of the ontology to the personal archive of the Italianarchitect and engineer Dino Tamburini (1924–2011). The authors plan to publish the archive
online and make it available through the National Archival System of Italy and Europeana.
Alex Green and Faith Lawrence reported on the latest progress on The Pan-Archival Catalogue
at the UK National Archives [Green and Lawrence, 2022]. This new catalog is based on linked
data and will bring together descriptions of both physical and digital records from a variety ofsources. The presentation focused on the results of an evaluation with end users regarding thedata model for the catalog. The authors concluded that although a linked data catalog offers
many technical advantages, archival professionals must also adopt new practices.

6

Concluding Remarks

The Linked Archives International Workshop was motivated by the need to examine current
technologies and data models for managing archives and describing their assets. The organizers
maintained the broad perspective adopted in the first edition of the workshop, considering all
aspects of linked data in cultural heritage. The call for contributions to the workshop was disseminated in cultural heritage communities and information technology circles dealing with semantic
web solutions. The workshop tried to attract scholars, cultural heritage organizations, and thegeneral public addressing the use of linked data. It is clear from current research that specialized
data from archives and museums can gain new meaning in the context of the global information
infrastructure. Also, new forms of expression in the arts and non-traditional archival assets requirea fresh view of their representation and access.
Within the time limits of the workshop, participants discussed several topics familiar to thosetaking a linked data approach to cultural heritage. Cultural heritage has traditionally been organized in sectors with specialized practices, namely libraries, archives, and museums. The distinction between assets in these sectors is currently blurred. Moreover, creators have more fluid
profiles and so do patrons and users in general. The semantic models open the spectrum of concepts common to all these communities: a location can be associated to an event, but also to
the place of birth of a person, the address of an organisation or the place where an artifact originated. There is considerable experience with semantic models, namely in the museum community,

ACM SIGIR Forum

6

Vol. 56 No. 2 December 2022

where the CIDOC-CRM model, a detailed event-based data model represented as an ontology,
originated. The use of CIDOC-CRM has now been extended to other domains.
The main limitation for those working on linked data for cultural heritage is the availability ofsolid technologies. Heritage institutions require long-term solutions and graph databases, and theirapplications must manage the dependency on technologies that may not be mature enough besides
evolving rapidly. The examples presented in the workshop have highlighted these challenges,
namely when dealing with projects that involve vast collections, as is typical of the archives.
Although the workshop was aimed at a specialized audience, the diversity of participants madeclear that linked data concerns people that range from the administration of heritage organizations to the creators of innovative technical solutions. The discussions led us to conclude that
cultural heritage stakeholders are taking a fresh view on managing their assets as part of a morecomprehensive information infrastructure. On the other hand, users in diverse areas are curious
about the new applications of assets held by libraries, archives, and museums.
Overall, the workshop allowed people with similar concerns and a great diversity of experiences
to meet. Most topics highlighted in the sessions will continue under discussion. We hope newopportunities will emerge to encourage a shared understanding of the problems ahead and thedemonstration of current results.

Acknowledgments
This workshop was proposed within the scope of the Portuguese EPISA project - DSAIPA/ DS/0023/2018, financed by National Funds through FCT—Foundation for Science and Technology
I.P..

References
Kerstin Arnold. Keynote: No Archive is an Island – A Tale of Exploring a Brave New World. In
Leonardo Candela and Gianmaria Silvello, editors, Workshops and Doctoral Consortium of the
26th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries 2022, page 57, 2022.
URL https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3246/07_keynote.pdf.
Brenda Reyes Ayala, Qiufeng Du, and Juyi Han. Detecting Content Drift on the Web Using Web
Archives and Textual Similarity. In Leonardo Candela and Gianmaria Silvello, editors, Workshops and Doctoral Consortium of the 26th International Conference on Theory and Practiceof Digital Libraries 2022, pages 77–85, 2022. URL https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3246/10_Pap
er3.pdf.
Leonardo Candela and Gianmaria Silvello, editors. Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries - Workshops and Doctoral Consortium, number
3246 in CEUR Workshop Proceedings, Aachen, 2022. URL http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3246/.
Luı́s Filipe Costa Cunha and José Carlos Ramalho. Fine-Tuning BERT Models to Extract Named
Entities from Archival Finding Aids. In Leonardo Candela and Gianmaria Silvello, editors,

ACM SIGIR Forum

7

Vol. 56 No. 2 December 2022

Workshops and Doctoral Consortium of the 26th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries 2022, pages 58–69, 2022. URL https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3246/08_Paper1.pdf.
Mariana Dias and Carla Teixeira Lopes. Mining Typewritten Digital Representations to Support
Archival Description. In Leonardo Candela and Gianmaria Silvello, editors, Workshops andDoctoral Consortium of the 26th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital
Libraries 2022, pages 70–76, 2022. URL https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3246/09_Paper2.pdf.
Alex Green and Faith Lawrence. The Shock of the New: Testing the Pan-Archival Linked Data
Catalogue with Users. In Leonardo Candela and Gianmaria Silvello, editors, Workshops andDoctoral Consortium of the 26th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital
Libraries 2022, pages 108–115, 2022. URL https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3246/13_Paper6.pdf.
Carla Teixeira Lopes, Cristina Ribeiro, Franco Niccolucci, Irene Rodrigues, and Nuno Freire.
Report on the 1st Linked Archives International Workshop (LinkedArchives 2021) at TPDL
2021. SIGIR Forum, 55(2), 2022. ISSN 0163-5840. doi: 10.1145/3527546.3527562. URL
https://doi.org/10.1145/3527546.3527562.
Daria Mikhaylova and Daniele Metilli. An Extension of RiC-O for Architectural Archives. In
Leonardo Candela and Gianmaria Silvello, editors, Workshops and Doctoral Consortium of the
26th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries 2022, pages 98–107,
2022. URL https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3246/12_Paper5.pdf.
Sérgio Nunes, Tiago Silva, Cláudia Martins, and Rita Peixoto. EPISA Platform: A Technical Infrastructure to Support Linked Data in Archival Management. In Leonardo Candela
and Gianmaria Silvello, editors, Workshops and Doctoral Consortium of the 26th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries 2022, pages 86–97, 2022. URL
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3246/11_Paper4.pdf.

ACM SIGIR Forum

8

Vol. 56 No. 2 December 2022