Producing and Consuming Linked Open Data
on Art with a Local Community
Fuyuko Matsumura1 , Iwao Kobayashi2 , Fumihiro Kato3 , Tetsuro Kamura4,5 ,Ikki Ohmukai1,4 , and Hideaki Takeda1,4
1National Institute of Informatics,
fuyuko@nii.ac.jp, i2k@nii.ac.jp, takeda@nii.ac.jp
2
Open Community Data Initiative
iwao@scholex.com
3
Research Organization of Information and Systems
fumi@nii.ac.jp
4
The Graduate University for Advanced Studies
5Tokyo University of the Arts
kamura.tetsuro@noc.geidai.ac.jp
Abstract. The importance of Linked Open Data (LOD) has not yet
been recognized by ordinary people. As the eﬀort to involve them into
LOD activity, we have developed Yokohama Art Spot, a mash-up application on local museum information to demonstrate the value of information sharing and reuse where data from diﬀerent communities areused together. Thanks to the flexibility of LOD, it provides useful viewsfor local museum information and uses three diﬀerent data sources, i.e.,
LODAC Museum which is a museum collection dataset, Yokohama Art
LOD which is an event dataset maintained by a local community, and
PinQA which is a Q&A dataset maintained by a company. In particular,
Yokohama Art LOD was the result of communication among researchers,
local volunteers, and people of the local government. Yokohama Art Spotworks as a good example of how such eﬀorts by local people can be rewarded by flexible use of the provided data.

1

Introduction

Open government is a move to publish government information to enhance government transparency and encourage citizens to participate in politics. Several
western countries and cities such as the United States1 , the United Kingdom2 ,Paris3 , and Berlin4 have websites to provide data to citizens and some of them
have already started to publish data in the Linked Data[1] format. Publishing
Linked Data accelerates the move toward open data and enables data sharing,
not only within the same field, but also with other fields. Indeed, in the United
Kingdom, citizens and companies can develop and provide web application or
smartphone applications using Linked Data provided by the government.
1

http://data.gov/
http://data.gov.uk/
3
http://opendata.paris.fr/
4
http://daten.berlin.de/2

In Japan, the Ministry of Internal Aﬀairs and Communications and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry lead in the eﬀort toward open government
and publish their data in various formats. However, most of these are publishedin PDF or Excel file formats, and it is diﬃcult for computers to automaticallyrecognize and extract a required data from such files in unstructured formats.
Under these circumstances, dissemination of the idea of Linked Open Data
(LOD) is important to the future of the Internet but it has not yet been recognized by ordinary people. The Linked Open Data for ACademia (LODAC)
project5 has started to publish LOD of museum, biodiversity, and geographic
information aiming to advance sharing and reuse of academic data in Japan. In
particular, the integrated museum collection data is called LODAC Museum[2].
Such actions for open data are becoming increasingly common in local communities that publish local information with social tools. In the city of Yokohama, which is the most populous city in Japan, there are many portal sitesthat distribute information about that area, however, a lot of overlaps occurs
between data used in each site, e.g., profiles of the same concert hall or thesame restaurant. Several citizens and organizations in Yokohama realized theimportance of open data for the eﬃcient use of data on local information about
Yokohama. They established Yokohama LOD project6 for individual persons orgroups to accelerate information publishing by the sharing and reuse of local
information in the LOD format. As a first step, the project has started to publish LOD of information on art events as Yokohama Art LOD and generated
typed links to LODAC Museum based on the discussion between researchers in
LODAC projects, local volunteer developers, and people of the local government.
In order to demonstrate the value of information sharing and reuse in the
LOD format, Yokohama Art Spot7 , a web application that provides information
on art in Yokohama, was developed. It uses PinQA, which is a local Q&A dataset
in addition to LODAC Museum and Yokohama Art LOD. This paper thus introduces the best practice of collaboration with a local community toward theacceleration of information distribution in the LOD format.

2

Linked Open Data (LOD)

Linked Open Data (LOD) represents datasets that give a Uniform Resource
Identifier (URI) to each thing as a global ID on the web and express relations
between those as links. LOD datasets connect to each other and construct a
global data space on the web called web of data[3], according to the following
principles: 1) Use URIs to identify things, 2) Use HTTP URIs so that these things
can be referred to and looked up (dereferenced) by people and user agents, 3)
Provide useful information about the thing when its URI is dereferenced, using
standard formats such as RDF/XML, and 4) Include links to other, related URIs
in the exposed data to improve discovery of other related information on the web.
5

http://lod.ac/
http://ocdi.jp/
7
http://lod.ac/apps/yas
6

The advantages of LOD can be divided into the following three points: 1)
encourage open data, 2) realize data sharing within the same field, and 3) realize
data sharing with other fields. On the web, open data is published in various data
formats, such as HTML, PDF, and Excel. People can easily read data expressedin these formats; however, it is diﬃcult for programs to automatically recognize
and extract a required data from such files, whereas, each thing is given a URI to
be identified as a resource in LOD. Compared to data such as HTML documents,
this makes it easier to access and reuse open data when the data is publishedas LOD. Moreover, it is also eﬀective for data sharing within the same field orwith other fields to identify unique items with URIs when several sites have data
indicating the same thing in common.

3

LODAC Museum: Integrating Museum Collection Datain Japan

3.1 Overview of LODAC Museum
LODAC Museum is an LOD of museum information constructed by the LODAC
project at the Transdisciplinary Research Integration Center in the Research
Organization of Information and Systems. In Japan, museums publish their collection information on their own websites, except for some web services that
integrate collection information, such as Cultural Heritage Online8 . This meansthat currently it is impossible, for example, to extract a list of museums that
own the art works of Taikan Yokoyama, a famous Japanese-style painter.
The LODAC project is thus attempting to build an LOD of museum collection information utilizing the advantages of LOD that advance data sharing
within the same field, as mentioned in section 2. Essentially, it is desired thateach museum publish their collection data in the LOD format and coordinate
them with semantic links. However, currently, the LODAC project obtains collection data from various websites and publishes such obtained data as a single
LOD.
LODAC Museum consists of over 40 million triples extracted from 114 museums and research institutes in Japan. This information is integrated according
to the Database of Japan Arts Thesaurus which is a reliable thesaurus of art
in Japan[4]. The database of government-designated cultural property9 , Cultural
Heritage Online, DBpedia Japanese Lite and DBpedia Japanese10 are also utilized to populate LODAC Museum.
3.2 Expression and implementation of data
Fig. 1 shows an RDF triple of a part of LODAC Museum. The main resource
types of LODAC Museum are works, creators, and institutions. Each resource
includes links to other resources, and all the data are described as graphs consisting of resources and links. For instance, the fact “The artist who painted Spring8

http://bunka.nii.ac.jp/
http://kunishitei.bunka.go.jp/bsys/
10
http://ja.dbpedia.org
9Sea is Taikan Yokoyama” is described as a triple like <http://lod.ac/id/20428><http://purl.org/dc/terms/creator> <http://lod.ac/id/1767> as shown in Fig. 1.
To integrate information of a certain thing distributed to several data sources,a resource representing the thing is given a URI as an ID resource and includes
links to reference resources consisting of information about the thing includedin each data source. For example, if information on Taikan Yokoyama can beobtained from museums A and B, an ID resource would be created to express
the identity of Taikan, and two reference resources are generated to describe
information obtained from museums A and B, respectively.
Furthermore, LODAC Museum uses the OWLIM-SE11 as our RDF store andprovides a SPARQL endpoint and a browsing interface with keyword search.

4

Yokohama Art LOD: Providing Information on Art
Events in Yokohama

4.1

The circumstances on publication of local information in
Yokohama

Nowadays, there are more and more events in local communities actively planned
and managed by citizens. At the same time, online tools such as Twitter, Facebook, and blogs that enable ordinary people to publish their news or opinions
have become popular. In the city of Yokohama, there are many people or groups
who provide local information on Yokohama using such online tools. However,
it is diﬃcult to make people reach the information published by each citizen or
each group because of too many information floods. Thus, the local governmentand several organizations provide several portal sites to aggregate and deliver
such event information. For instance, the Yokohama Arts Foundation distributes
event information and news on art in Yokohama at their website Yokohama Art
Navi12 . On the other hand, the Yokohama Convention & Visitors Bureau lists
local sightseeing spots, events, and restaurants on the website of the Yokohama
visitor’s guide13 . Hamaspo.com provides local sports information and Otodokebindelivers event information in each ward of Yokohama.

Fig. 1. A triple that expresses Taikan Yokoyama.
11

http://www.ontotext.com/owlim
http://yan.yafjp.org/
13
http://www.welcome.city.yokohama.jp/eng/travel/
12

4.2

Yokohama LOD Project and information on art events in the
LOD format
Nevertheless, sometimes overlaps of information, i.e., address, genre, and opening hours of institutions, occur between such portal sites because these are common in the same area, Yokohama. Thus, some local volunteers came up with
an idea that open data realizes eﬃcient utilization of local information. Then,they have established the Yokohama LOD project to integrate those data in the
LOD format to encourage publishing, sharing, and reusing local information in
Yokohama. It would enable the reuse of data created by others according to the
web standard and the reduction of cost for such data creations.
As a necessary first step, Yokohama Arts Foundation has allowed them touse data of all art events provided at Yokohama Art Navi website, and they
have started to construct Yokohama Art LOD from those data. Researchers at
LODAC projects have also discussed how to design their data and how to choose
vocabularies with them. The number of triples of Yokohama Art LOD is 627,257
at present.
Currently, Yokohama Arts Foundation aggregates event information fromeach museum or each gallery and manually inputs these into the appropriate
format for publication by the staﬀ. The event information is written in text
format; however, if the information of events, institutions, artists, and nearest
station is expressed as resources and the relation between them are written as
semantic links, it becomes possible to complement the missing information of acertain resource with other accumulated information via links.
In fact, event resources of Yokohama Art LOD have semantic links to the resources of LODAC Museum that describe the institutions which are the venues
for those events, and institutions resources have also links to the resources of
DBpedia Japanese which indicate same venues. Identification of those venues in
two diﬀerent datasets were processed based on text matching. It would be capable to obtain more detailed information on art via those links and demonstrate
the value of the information sharing and reuse.
Providing information in the LOD format is suitable for the publication of
local information, which contains groups or communities of various scales, because sharing and linking resources realize broader information distribution in
local communities without making the eﬀort to collect all the data separately.
In the United States and the United Kingdom, the government and the public administration lead the eﬀort on open data[5][6], whereas in Yokohama, theirwork should be noted because their LOD activities for open data is being attempted from the grass-root level.

5

Yokohama Art Spot

This section introduces Yokohama Art Spot, a web application developed as aresult of the collaboration between researchers, a local community and a company to make ordinary people notice the value of sharing and reuse of the data
provided by others. It uses following three diﬀerent datasets as data sources;
LODAC Museum, Yokohama Art LOD and PinQA.

PinQA is a social geographical Q&A service provided by NTT Resonant, Inc.
that obtains and shares users Q&As corresponding to the specified geographicalregions in a map. They have also started to publish a small LOD dataset consisting of 777 triples generated from aggregated Q&A data, but it has not been
linked to LODAC Museum and Yokohama Art LOD yet. It would help users toimagine their visit to the event, for instance, they can plan to take a rest at a coffee shop near the venue according to the past question about restaurants aroundthere made by other users. Thus, typed links only exist between the resources of
institutions in LODAC Museum and the resources of events in Yokohama Art
LOD in this system. Links represented by dotted line are planned to connect in
the near future.
Therefore, Yokohama Art Spot is provided conventional and novel local information on art in Yokohama based on a museum collection dataset, an art
events dataset, and a local Q&A dataset.
5.1 Overview of the developed system
Fig. 2 shows an overview of this application. First, the people who will use
this system are divided into two types: a user who visits the application on the
web and a staﬀ who manually aggregates and maintains the data. A user uses
this application to obtain desired information and a staﬀ manages updates andaddition of LOD datasets used in this system.
The interface is developed with HTML and JavaScript. If a user takes anaction, such as opening a new page that describes details about an institution,
this is queried to the SPARQL endpoints of each LOD. The application thenpresents new information to the user using the data returned from the SPARQL
endpoints.
5.2 Main features of the developed system
Yokohama Art Spot consists of 1) map view, 2) institution view, and 3) administration view. Both 1) and 2) provide information on art in Yokohama byembedding data obtained with SPARQL into templates of web pages.
Map view When a user accesses the application, a map view is presented, as
shown in Fig. 3. This view gives users information on the kind of art they can experience by displaying institutions. The locations of the current day’s events andQ&As related to the displayed area are also presented on the map of Yokohama.
In this map view, the name, address, and geographical coordinates of institutions
to be presented are extracted from LODAC Museum with SPARQL using thelatitudes and longitudes of the displayed area. As for the event information, theapplication obtains data for the events that would be held at those institutions
included in the displayed area from Yokohama Art LOD using SPARQL.
Institution view The institution view appears when a user clicks on the markerof the institution on the map view as shown in Fig. 4. This page shows basic
information on the institution, event information and collection information. Todisplay basic information on the institution, the name, access options, hours ofoperation, and the geographical coordinates are extracted from LODAC Museumwith SPARQL according to the URI of the institution. Moreover, events thathave links indicating a venue for the institution are extracted by SPARQL,
and those event data are displayed in a timeline interface as shown in Fig. 4.
Collection data are also acquired from LODAC Museum by tracing art works
linked to the institution with SPARQL.
Administration view Event data of Yokohama Art LOD are frequently updated and added, whereas information on collections and institutions is fairly
stable. Currently, the same data is published in the art calendar on the Yokohama
Art Navi and is manually updated by the staﬀ of Yokohama Arts Foundation.
However, it is diﬃcult for staﬀ who are not familiar with RDF to input data in
the LOD format. This application, however, creates forms to make it easier toFig. 2. The system overview of Yokohama Art Spot.

Fig. 3. The map view of Yokohama Art SpotFig. 4. The institution view of the Yokohama Museum of Art.

Fig. 5. The input form for institution information generated by Semantic MediaWiki.

input event or artist information based on Semantic MediaWiki14 [7]. The staﬀ
would thus be able to generate RDF of Yokohama Art LOD by inputting required data into the form as illustrated in Fig. 5. This would enable addition
or correction of data and realize data circulation of LOD consisting of creation,
sharing, aggregation and usage.

6

Discussion

Yokohama Art Spot was developed by using three diﬀerent LOD datasets aiming
to make ordinary people notice the importance of sharing and reuse of information, and involve them into the LOD activities.
First, the eﬀects of interdisciplinary use of three datasets are discussed. The
developed system provides a couple of views such as map view and institution14

http://semantic-mediawiki.org/

Fig. 6. An example of a scenario that guides users to discover new knowledge.

view even though the link connects only an institution data and an event data
in LODAC Museum and Yokohama Art LOD, respectively. As shown in Fig. 6,
for example, when users access the institution view of a specific institution toview the events to be held there, they may have a chance to see the collection
data of that institution. If they find their favorite or famous paintings, they can
explore the information through links to LODAC Museum. It is also possible toreach the same artist’s paintings owned by other institutions. Therefore, more
extensive information distribution would be realized by linking three diﬀerent
types of LOD datasets such as collection data containing ancient artworks andthe data of current art events.
Second, the benefits of the compliance with the web standard are discussed.
Even if data from other applications were available via an API, some modifications would be required to use such data because each API is diﬀerent. Thus,
when an application uses data from several data sources, this costs more compared to using a single data source. In contrast, in LOD, data are describedusing RDF, the standard data model, and they can be queried with SPARQL,
the standard query language. Even if the number of LOD used in the application increases, any modifications to the application would be small. Because ofthis, the event data in the LOD format are easily presented on the institution
view and it also acts as a reference of the institution when it has no webpage bysimply providing accumulated data in the LOD format. In addition, developersof PinQA have also released their data in the LOD format and the map viewpresents word of mouth from PinQA on the displayed area without any major
modification.
Finally, Yokohama Art Spot has been awarded the prize at Linked Open
Data Challenge Japan 2011 for the contribution on the collaborative use of LOD
datasets. In response, Yokohama LOD project has been interviewed as a leadingedge example of open data in the LOD format by the people from the government
who work for open data. There is no doubt that the developed system acts animportant role to get people to notice the importance of information sharing andthey would lead the open data with other ordinary people in Japan.

7

Related Work

Several related projects have attempted to provide users the chance to access
cultural heritage information.
The Google Art Project15 is an ambitious project that allows viewing ofartworks with a brush stroke-level detail for greater appreciation as well as a
virtual tour of 151 museums across 40 countries. They prepared this application
to provide an environment to enjoy the fine art in famous museums around theworld. The developed application, Yokohama Art Spot, aims to introduce a wide
variety of modern art that are still being created and exhibited in the local areain addition to the fine art.
The following projects structured their data in the LOD format and enable
a multifaceted search based on the properties of resources. Europeana[8] aggregates collection data from museums in Europe and structure the data based on
the Europeana Data Model[9]. They organized some hackathons to encourage
the use of Europeana via the Europeana API, and some applications have beendeveloped. Although these applications use Europeana only via API, possible
relations between Europeana and other LOD datasets have not been definedand utilized yet.
CultureSampo[10] provides Finland’s national cultural heritage content fromvarious perspectives generated by integrated multiple metadata schemas andcross-domain content. Yokohama Art Spot is similar to this system because it
aﬀords diverse semantic visualizations based on metadata: map view, timelineview, and collection view[11][12]. The developed system also utilizes several typesof content, such as collection data and events, just as CultureSampo does. The
MultimediaN E-Culture project[13] also merged partial collection data of the
Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde into a single LOD dataset. Yokohama Art Spot is diﬀerent from these projects because
they manually integrate data aggregated from several data sources into a single dataset, whereas the developed system separately uses three independent
datasets.
The CHIP Project[14] and the British Museum16 generate their own LOD
datasets from collection data of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and the British
Museum, respectively. The former tries to enrich a user’s experience with apersonalized interactive tour guide using recommendations based on user models[15][16]. These projects, however, focus only on data and users inside eachmuseum, in contrast to the developed system.
The novelty of our research activities is the collaborative use of three diﬀerent
types of LOD: LODAC Museum, Yokohama Art LOD, and PinQA based on theactual collaboration between researchers, the local volunteers, and the people
from the local government. We also succeeded to involve ordinary people toopen data or the LOD activities by the demonstration of the benefit to sharedata and reuse them each other.
1516

http://www.googleartproject.com/
http://www.britishmuseum.org/

8

Conclusion

In this paper, Yokohama Art Spot, a web application for the art guide in Yokohama, has been developed and it uses three diﬀerent types of LOD datasets,i.e., LODAC Museum which is a collection dataset crawled from museum web
sites, Yokohama Art LOD which is an art event dataset maintained by a local
community, and PinQA which is a local Q&A dataset maintained by a company
based on the collaboration between researchers, local volunteers, and the peopleof the local government.
LOD datasets such as collection data containing ancient artworks and thedata of current art events or Q&As complement each other, and this is expected
to enable broader information distribution. The addition of a new data source
has become easy by the standard format and technologies such as RDF andSPARQL. As a result, Yokohama Art Spot works as a good example of how theeﬀorts by local volunteers can be rewarded by flexible use of the LOD dataset
provided by them.
Currently, it is required to input an institution’s LODAC Museum URI tolink with the event resource of Yokohama Art LOD, and thus the usability of
updates will be improved by suggesting candidates according to the keywords
input for the actual operation. In addition, ATR Creative Co., Ltd. has added
new functionality to display Points Of Interest (POIs) included in LODAC Museum on the map on an iPhone application. Thus, our project plans to develop
a smartphone application that will allow a user to search the contents close to
the current position and annotate his/her own personal perspective to resources.
Finally, it is desired to advance the use and the creation of museum collection
LOD datasets and local information LOD datasets for future work by developing a web application package like the developed system to apply to other local
communities in Japan.

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank Yokokhama Arts Foundation and Hiroyuki Sato fromNTT Resonant, Inc. for providing their datasets on art events and Q&As, respectively. We also gratefully appreciate the contribution of Toru Takahashi andHiroshi Ueda from ATR Creative Co., Ltd. for the discussion on the developed
application.

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