Multi-viewpoint knowledge graphs for minority cultural heritage: the case of online Jewish museum collections

Authors

  • Sara Minster Bar-Ilan University
  • Maayan Zhitomirsky-Geffet Bar-Ilan University
  • Inna Kizhner Bar-Ilan University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.47989/ir31iConf64200

Keywords:

Multi-viewpoint knowledge graph, Cultural heritage, Knowledge representation, Minorities, Museum data collections

Abstract

Introduction. This study addresses the representation of ethnic minority cultures in online museum collections, which often reflect diverse viewpoints. We propose a data-driven methodology to construct a large-scale multi-viewpoint knowledge graph, using Jewish cultural heritage as a case study.

Method. We developed an LLM-based pipeline that combines object typing, named entity recognition, relation extraction, enrichment, and clustering.

Results. An analysis of 647,951 records and 178,444 extracted subjects from the collections of Jewish museums across the globe revealed diverse thematic emphases: Israel and the Netherlands prioritised religious themes, while others highlighted everyday life. Surprisingly, only Australia emphasised the Holocaust.

Conclusion(s). The central contribution of this study is the development of a knowledge organisation system capable of tracing major trends and identifying patterns in the polyvocality of perspectives. The methodology provides quantifiable, scalable analysis of multi-viewpoint cultural heritage, extendable to other minorities.

References

Baclawski, K., Bennett, M., Berg-Cross, G., Casanave, C., Fritzsche, D., Luciano, J., Schneider, T., Sharma, R., Singer, J., Sowa, J., Sriram, R.D., Westererinen, A., and Whitten, D. (2018). ‘Ontology summit 2018 communique – contexts in context’, Applied Ontology 13(3), pp. 181-200.

Blei, D. M., Ng, A. Y., & Jordan, M. I. (2003). Latent dirichlet allocation. Journal of Machine Learning research, 3(Jan), 993-1022.

Dijkshoorn, C., Aroyo, L., Van Ossenbruggen, J., & Schreiber, G. (2018). Modeling cultural heritage data for online publication. Applied Ontology, 13(4), 255-271.

Doerr, M. (2003). ‘The CIDOC Conceptual Reference Module - an ontological approach to semantic interoperability of metadata’, AI Magazine 24(3), pp. 75-92.

Doerr, M., Kritsotaki, A., and Boutsika, A. (2011). ‘Factual argumentation - a core model for assertions making’, Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH) 3(3), p. 34.

Fan, Y., Shi, L., & Yuan, L. (2023). Topic modeling methods for short texts: A survey. Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems, 45(2), 1971-1990.

Kizhner, I., Terras, M., Afanaseva, J., Pusenkova, D., Sherer, M., and Skorinkin, D. (2022). ‘The culture of very rich and very poor: Do digital museum collections tell us anything about Jewish culture’, in: Zaagsma et al. (eds), Jewish Studies in the Digital Age, Berlin: de Gruyter.

Kochavi, S. (2022). Jewish museums in the United States: Foundations and changes in the twentieth century. Ars Judaica: The Bar Ilan Journal of Jewish Art, 18(1), 145-156.

Likhitha, S., Harish, B. S., & Kumar, H. K. (2019). A detailed survey on topic modeling for document and short text data. International Journal of Computer Applications, 178(39), 1-9.

Shoilee, S. B. A., de Boer, V., & van Ossenbruggen, J. (2023). Polyvocal knowledge modelling for ethnographic heritage object provenance. In Knowledge graphs: Semantics, machine learning, and languages (pp. 127-143). IOS Press.

Stevenson, A. (2022). Egyptian archaeology and the twenty-first century museum. Cambridge University Press.

Turner, H. (2020). Cataloguing culture: Legacies of colonialism in museum documentation. UBC Press.

Ullmann, T., Hennig, C., & Boulesteix, A. L. (2022). Validation of cluster analysis results on validation data: A systematic framework. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, 12(3), e1444.

Vlachidis, Andreas, et al. ‘CrossCult D2. 5 Upper-level Cultural Heritage Ontology.’ (2018).

Zhitomirsky-Geffet, M. (2019). ‘Towards a diversified knowledge organisation system – An open network of inter-linked subsystems with multiple validity scopes’, Journal of Documentation 75(5), pp. 1124-1138.

Zhitomirsky-Geffet, M., Kizhner, I., and Minster, S. (2023). ‘What do they make us see: a comparative study of cultural bias in online databases of two large museums’, Journal of Documentation (preprint). https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-02-2022-0047.

Downloads

Published

2026-03-20

How to Cite

Minster, S., Zhitomirsky-Geffet, M., & Kizhner, I. (2026). Multi-viewpoint knowledge graphs for minority cultural heritage: the case of online Jewish museum collections. Information Research an International Electronic Journal, 31(iConf), 801–811. https://doi.org/10.47989/ir31iConf64200

Issue

Section

Conference proceedings

Similar Articles

<< < 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 > >> 

You may also start an advanced similarity search for this article.