Enrichment and structuring of archival description metadata

Cultural heritage institutions are making their digital content available and searchable online. Digital metadata descriptions play an important role in this endeavour. This metadata is mostly manually created and often lacks detailed annotation, consistency and, most importantly, explicit semantic content descriptors which would facilitate online browsing and exploration of available information. This paper proposes the enrichment of existing cultural heritage metadata with automatically generated semantic content descriptors. In particular, it is concerned with metadata encoding archival descriptions (EAD) and proposes to use automatic term recognition and term clustering techniques for knowledge acquisition and content-based document classification purposes.