A Gateway to the Knowledge in Taiwan’s Digital Archives

Abstract

Taiwan’s digital archives cover a broad range of cultural and natural assets. More than 2 million objects have been accumulated since the project was launched in 2002. As the number and diversity of digitised objects have increased rapidly, it has become increasingly difficult for people to gain a clear picture of the contents of the archives. To disseminate the abundant and diverse resources to the public, we are building a knowledge structure that consists of categorized keywords extracted from objects’ metadata, and developing a function called “Tagging Tool” to facilitate fast and efficient mining of resources. For example, users who want to read an article enriched with archive collections can utilize the tool to identify archive specific keywords in the text automatically and annotate them with references to relevant resources. As a result, users can save a great deal of time on keyword searching, and contextualize various entities, such as historical events and people’s names.