Abstract

Records on Japanese “Comfort Women” have been individually managed by private sectors or institutions, and some are provided as digital archives on the Internet. However, records of digital archives differ in the composition and representation of metadata by individual institutions. Meanwhile, there is a lack of a consistent structure to describe the relationships between and among these records, leading to their fragmentation and disconnectedness. This paper proposes a knowledge model for interlinking the digital archival resources and builds a knowledge graph by integrating the records from distributed digital archives. It derives common elements by analyzing metadata from the diverse digital archives and expresses them in standard vocabularies to semantically describe multiple entities and relationships of the digital archival resources. In particular, the study includes the refinement of collected data to search and thread dispersed records and the enrichment of external data to provide significant contextual information of records. An evaluation of the knowledge graph is performed via a query measuring the (dis)connectivity between the distributed records. As a result, the knowledge graph is capable of interlinking and retrieving fragmented records, providing substantial contextual information on the records with external data enrichment, and searching accurately to match the user’s intentions through semantic-based queries.