@article {857,
	title = {Stitching History into Semantics: LLM-Supported Knowledge Graph Engineering for 19th-Century Greek Bookbinding},
	journal = {Machine Learning and Knowledge Extraction},
	volume = {7},
	year = {2025},
	pages = {59},
	abstract = {<p>Preserving cultural heritage can be efficiently supported by structured and semantic representation of historical artifacts. Bookbinding, a critical aspect of book history, provides valuable insights into past craftsmanship, material use, and conservation practices. However, existing bibliographic records often lack the depth needed to analyze bookbinding techniques, provenance, and preservation status. This paper presents a proof-of-concept system that explores how Large Language Models (LLMs) can support knowledge graph engineering within the context of 19th-century Greek bookbinding (1830{\textendash}1900), and as a result, generate a domain-specific ontology and a knowledge graph. Our ontology encapsulates materials, binding techniques, artistic styles, and conservation history, integrating metadata standards like MARC and Dublin Core to ensure interoperability with existing library and archival systems. To validate its effectiveness, we construct a Neo4j knowledge graph, based on the generated ontology and utilize Cypher Queries{\textemdash}including LLM-generated queries{\textemdash}to extract insights about bookbinding practices and trends. This study also explores how semantic reasoning over the knowledge graph can identify historical binding patterns, assess book conservation needs, and infer relationships between bookbinding workshops. Unlike previous bibliographic ontologies, our approach provides a comprehensive, semantically rich representation of bookbinding history, methods and techniques, supporting scholars, conservators, and cultural heritage institutions. By demonstrating how LLMs can assist in ontology/KG creation and query generation, we introduce and evaluate a semi-automated pipeline as a methodological demonstration for studying historical bookbinding, contributing to digital humanities, book conservation, and cultural informatics. Finally, the proposed approach can be used in other domains, thus, being generally applicable in knowledge engineering.</p>
},
	keywords = {bookbinding history, Cultural heritage, knowledge graphs, large language models, ontology engineering},
	issn = {2504-4990},
	doi = {https://doi.org/10.3390/make7030059},
	author = {Doumanas, Dimitrios and Ntalouka, Efthalia and Vassilakis, Costas and Wallace, Manolis and Kotis, Konstantinos}
}
@article {772,
	title = {Hydria: An Online Data Lake for Multi-Faceted Analytics in the Cultural Heritage Domain},
	journal = {Big Data and Cognitive Computing},
	volume = {4},
	year = {2020},
	pages = {7},
	abstract = {Advancements in cultural informatics have significantly influenced the way we perceive, analyze, communicate and understand culture. New data sources, such as social media, digitized cultural content, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, have allowed us to enrich and customize the cultural experience, but at the same time have created an avalanche of new data that needs to be stored and appropriately managed in order to be of value. Although data management plays a central role in driving forward the cultural heritage domain, the solutions applied so far are fragmented, physically distributed, require specialized IT knowledge to deploy, and entail significant IT experience to operate even for trivial tasks. In this work, we present Hydria, an online data lake that allows users without any IT background to harvest, store, organize, analyze and share heterogeneous, multi-faceted cultural heritage data. Hydria provides a zero-administration, zero-cost, integrated framework that enables researchers, museum curators and other stakeholders within the cultural heritage domain to easily (i) deploy data acquisition services (like social media scrapers, focused web crawlers, dataset imports, questionnaire forms), (ii) design and manage versatile customizable data stores, (iii) share whole datasets or horizontal/vertical data shards with other stakeholders, (iv) search, filter and analyze data via an expressive yet simple-to-use graphical query engine and visualization tools, and (v) perform user management and access control operations on the stored data. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first solution in the literature that focuses on collecting, managing, analyzing, and sharing diverse, multi-faceted data in the cultural heritage domain and targets users without an IT background.},
	keywords = {analytics and visualization, big data management, Cultural heritage, data lake, data store, open source},
	doi = {10.3390/bdcc4020007},
	url = {https://www.mdpi.com/2504-2289/4/2/7},
	author = {Kimon Deligiannis and Paraskevi Raftopoulou and Christos Tryfonopoulos and Nikos Platis and Costas Vassilakis}
}
@article {715,
	title = {Bringing a peripheral, traditional venue to the digital era with targeted narratives},
	journal = {Digital Applications in Archaeology and Cultural Heritage},
	volume = {14},
	year = {2019},
	month = {sep},
	pages = {e00111},
	abstract = {The current work presents a method of enhancing museum content with narratives targeting history reflection in a personalized manner, delivered by an especially designed mobile app. The mobile app is a part of a technology ecosystem that supports the visitor before, during and after her visit. Within the framework of the European H2020 CrossCult project, a method was designed, implemented and tested to enhance museum content with digital material, enriched narratives and means to actively engage visitors. In particular, the method was implemented and tested for the content of the Archaeological Museum of Tripolis (Greece) and specific content examples are presented here, together with data from visitor evaluation. The results showed that content was significantly and qualitatively enhanced and visitors recognized the potential of the app in triggering visitor curiosity, new forms of engagement, and the ability to reflect on the connections between historical and social phenomena.},
	keywords = {Cultural heritage, Museum app, Narratives, reflection, Visitor experience},
	doi = {10.1016/j.daach.2019.e00111},
	url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212054819300098},
	author = {Angeliki Antoniou and Susana Reboreda Morillo and George Lepouras and Jason Diakoumakos and Costas Vassilakis and Martin Lopez Nores and Catherine Emma Jones}
}
@article {Vassilakis_fgcs17,
	title = {exhiSTORY: Smart Exhibits That Tell Their Own Stories},
	journal = {Future Generation of Computer Systems},
	volume = {81},
	year = {2018},
	pages = {542-556},
	abstract = {Museum exhibitions are designed to tell a story; this story is woven by curators and in its context a particular aspect of each exhibit, fitting to the message that the story is intended to convey, is highlighted. Adding new exhibits to the story requires curators to identify for each exhibit its aspects that fit to the message of the story and position the exhibit at the right place in the story thread. The availability of rich semantic information for exhibits, allows for exploiting the wealth of meanings that museum exhibits express, enabling the automated or semi-automated generation of practically countless stories that can be told. Personalization algorithms can then be employed to choose from these stories the ones most suitable for each individual user, based on the semantics of the stories and information within the user profile. In this work we examine how opportunities arising from technological advances in the fields of IoT and semantics can be used to develop smart, self-organizing exhibits that cooperate with each other and provide visitors with comprehensible, rich, diverse, personalized and highly stimulating experiences. These notions are included in the design of a system named exhiSTORY, which also exploits previously ignored information and identifies previously unseen semantic links. We present the architecture of the system and discuss its application potential.},
	keywords = {Cultural heritage, IoT, personalization, Quality of Experience (QoE), Self-organizing exhibitions, semantics},
	doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2017.10.038},
	url = {https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167739X17324093},
	author = {Costas Vassilakis and Vassilis Poulopoulos and Angela Antoniou and Manolis Wallace and Giorgos Lepouras and Martin Lopez Nores}
}
