Case study: Legermuseum (Army Museum)
The object collection of the Legermuseum (Army Museum) relates to the formation and development of the Royal Netherlands Army and the Royal Netherlands Indies Army as well as the development of weaponry. The museum offers a narrative representation of the military history of our country in all its forms. The collection comprises approximately 50,000 objects, varying from tanks, uniforms and weapons to books, handwritings, periodicals, engravings and photographs. Knowledge and information on these objects, together with context, will be available online in the near future.
Re-using reference structures
The museum intends to share its knowledge through the existing reference material: the 1861/1862 Militair woordenboek (Military dictionary) by Landolt on weaponry and military science, the Glossarium Armorum (a pictorial encyclopaedia with legends on weapons of defence), lists of keywords relating to the Visser weapon collection, a thesaurus on service divisions in the Dutch army and booklets with keywords combined with images compiled by general F.A. Hoefer.
All this material contains a large number of keywords and descriptions of those keywords (jointly: lemmas). In the RNA project, keywords are linked with matching words in the description of other keywords. Thus is created a network of lemmas, a reference structure that is already implicitly present in the descriptions. There is no need to come up with a new reference structure. This is brought about automatically by linking lemmas. Such a lemma network is largely realised in an automated environment.
Object descriptions, books, articles and other knowledge owned by the museum are then linked to the lemma network in the same way. New content is linked in this way as well.
Optimal searching
The result is an encyclopaedic network of lemmas. The end-user can jump from keyword to keyword and from each keyword to linked content.
