Cultural Heritage Semantic Portals: a Systematic Literature Review

Tracking #: 3883-5097

Authors: 
Luiz Miranda
Krzysztof Kutt
Grzegorz J. Nalepa

Responsible editor: 
Guest Editors 2025 OD+CH

Submission type: 
Survey Article
Abstract: 
This work provides a comprehensive framework for evaluating CH semantic portals and an overview of components aiming at increasing the implementation of interoperable Semantic Web applications for cultural heritage (CH). The paper presents a systematic literature review of 77 academic papers published in the last 10 years describing 68 cultural heritage semantic portals through five key research dimensions. First, we examine the semantic layer, documenting the adoption of ontologies (CIDOC-CRM, EDM) and controlled vocabularies (Getty AAT, GeoNames). Second, we investigate resource integration workflows, from data acquisition methods to preprocessing formats. Third, we catalog presentation paradigms across web, mobile, and immersive (AR/VR) platforms, while evaluating framework usage (Omeka S, ResearchSpace) and the presence of advanced research features. Fourth, we examine the technical systems used, such as database tools and ontology software. Finally, we look at organizational factors including project motivation, participating institutions, and how portals are evaluated. Our findings demonstrate uneven adoption of Semantic Web standards, with 20% of portals using non-interoperable ontologies and 41% lacking vocabulary links. While human-centric interfaces dominate, only 24% support machine-readable access via SPARQL. Furthermore, over 50% of the surveyed portals are inaccessible—either due to missing links in the publications or because the provided URLs lead to broken/non-existent pages. The study highlights the need for: (1) improved documentation of implementation practices, (2) reusable open-source tools for data harmonization, and (3) strategies to bridge the gap between large-scale and smaller CH projects.
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Tags: 
Reviewed

Decision/Status: 
Minor Revision

Solicited Reviews:
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Review #1
By Jakub Klimek submitted on 03/Sep/2025
Suggestion:
Minor Revision
Review Comment:

The authors present a survey of Cultural Heritage (CH) semantic portals, analyzing their availability, purpose and the used technologies and vocabularies. The authors follow a clearly defined methodology and present the results in a clear way.

The contribution can serve as an introductory text for the topic of Cultural Heritage semantic portals and what to expect from them.

The survey is comprehensive and balanced, the inclusion criteria are clearly stated and followed.
A minor issue is that it is unclear, why the authors chose the 4 literature databases - WoS, Scopus, IEEE eXplore and ACM DL, and not others like DBLP or Google Scholar.

The text and the figures are readable. There is one minor issue: the use of [number] reference as a subject. Better “The authors of [number]”, e.g. in 2.2 on p4.
There are also minor typos:
p3: Forth => Fourth
p13: 3d => 3D
p18: Table ?? (missing reference)

The content of the contribution is relevant to the broader Semantic Web community, as it showcases, how advanced is the Cultural Heritage field in the usage of semantic technologies, which can now be better compared to their usage in other fields.

The data artifacts cover both appendices of the paper, and are structured as a table in MS Excel format. However, they are only attached to the paper in the submission system. They are not hosted at any well-known repository such as GitHub, FigShare or Zenodo. Therefore, they are not described by any README file and they do not have long-term stable URLs.
The files are Excel representation of the LaTeX source for the tables in the appendices. However, the publications are referred to only via the \cite{---} LaTeX command with the identifier of the publication in the authors' source BibTeX file. This cannot be interpreted without the resulting PDF, and manually pairing the publications based on their order in the appendices. It would be better to include a more processable publication identification. DOI and URL, where available, and the full bibtex record instead of just the internal identifier.

Review #2
Anonymous submitted on 14/Dec/2025
Suggestion:
Major Revision
Review Comment:

This article provides a comprehensive framework for evaluating CH semantic portals with a focus on increasing the implementation of interoperable Semantic Web applications for cultural heritage. The article provides an interesting overview and is interesting to the broader Semantic Web community. While the article is well structured, I am providing a list of suggestions and minor comments.

## Abstract
- After reading the text, they use PRISMA for the analysis. In this sense, the abstract could be improved by mentioning that PRISMA was employed as main framework?
- The abstract could also briefly describe future work.

### Section 1 Introduction
- The introduction could be enhanced by describing current initiatives concerning the publication and reuse of digital collections such as AI4LAM, GLAM Labs, CARE and Collections as data. The authors will find many references with regard to these international initiatives.
- I would suggest clearly stating the audience of this work (e.g., targeted at researchers, PhD students, practitioners...)
- A potential reference to be included: Toma Tasovac, Sally Chambers, Erzsébet Tóth-Czifra. Cultural Heritage Data from a Humanities Research Perspective: A DARIAH Position Paper. 2020. ⟨hal-02961317⟩

### Section 2
- In Section 2.1, I miss Wikibase, and in particular Wikibase Cloud (https://www.wikibase.cloud/), as a semantic portal to publish and enrich digital collections.

### Section 3.
- The authors state that they use PRISMA, however, I would suggest to provide an overview of "similar" techniques and to state why they use PRISMA.
- The authors provide RQ1-RQ5 for the analysis. The questions are of interest for the community. If possible, I would suggest improving these with additional topics such as the use of AI in combination with the semantic portals as well as the integration with data research infrastructures such as data spaces (https://www.dataspace-culturalheritage.eu/en) o cloud infrastructures (https://www.echoes-eccch.eu/). While I understand that these infrastructures are still underdevelopment, and analysis and/or brief description could help institutions and projects to engage with them. This will also increase the impact and visibility of this work.

### Section 4 Results
- When the authors mention that the data is connected to external repositories such as Wikidata, it might be worth it mentioning that in many cases this link is done via a Wikidata property instead of an owl:sameAs property.

### Section 5 Discussion
- The authors could use the acronym for cultural heritage since they previously provided the extended text. Please, review all the acronyms so they follow a similar scheme (1st time they appear extended and acronym, then the rest of the appearances use the acronym)

### Conclusions
- A potential idea for future work to improve this work could be to publish the results in the form of Collections as data and/or using a semantic vocabulary/ontology to describe the results.
- machine-readeble -> machine-readable

### General
- The authors use "Fig", "fig." and "Fig.". Please review this for the whole text.
- Table ?? contains all the data points used for answering RQ4 -> please add the correct reference for the table
- The authors use capital and lowercase for titles, journal titles and concepts in the list of references. I also noticed one of them including "cited by.." which might not be necessary. Please, review the list of references.
- "where the information was assessed given the full eligibility criteria present in Table 2" ". -> remove the space
- In Section 4, where the authors reference Table 3, they could state that this table is in the appendix to guide the potential readers.
- The data provided as additional output of this work should be provided with a permanent doi which can be obtained using platforms such as Zenodo or Figshare. It does not include a README file describing the content.

Review #3
By Joseph Want-Kathrein submitted on 09/Jun/2026
Suggestion:
Accept
Review Comment:

This paper presents findings of a meta-study of papers in the field of Cultural Heritage (CH) data dissemination. The main audience of the paper should be researchers in the field of CH, resp. Digital Humanities (DH), managers / chairperson of CH institutions (e.g. libraries, museums and archives), and people who implement solutions for CH institutions. People who work in this field and want to support the FAIR principles and to look at other projects for the consulting purpose will find in this study a very good overview over the tools and possibilities offered in this field. It is not an introductory text, as authors expect readers to have basic knowledge about Linked Data, Database Management Systems, and the development of Ontology, but it can be the start point for a survey for projects that are similar to the project one pursuits at the moment.

The paper scrutinizes 77 papers between 2015 and 2025 in depth. With this amount of papers we can expect that the findings are representative. The restriction to the last 10 years may seem arbitrary, however, given the fact that work, especially the development of CH portals and web applications only started around 15 years ago, the restriction is a reasonable decision. The authors did not only study the papers, but they also scrutinized the portals discussed and presented in the articles. The focus clearly lies in the interoperability of data provided in these portals.

The text is clearly readable and easy to read. The intentions, the methodology, the result of the study and the conclusion can be easily followed!

This paper is an important overview for all CHIs which want to offer data and metadata to the world. The authors also address important issues in the field: There are seemingly many different solutions for the same problem; and different portals also develop different solutions for their own use-case. While the reviewer does not fully agree with the conclusion offered by the authors, the opinions expressed in the paper should nevertheless be taken seriously and must be put into discussion in the field.

Overall, a very good paper that gathers knowledge from different papers and portals to study different ways!