Bridging Data Gaps: Harnessing Semantic Associations for Knowledge Discovery in Colonial Heritage

Abstract

Cultural heritage data, particularly from colonial contexts, frequently presents an incomplete and biased view, reflecting historical institutional priorities more than contemporary knowledge requirements. Consequently, knowledge graphs derived from these records often contain incomplete, fragmented, and skewed data, including absent attributes or values, missing semantic links, and under-represented perspectives. This work addresses the challenge of knowledge discovery under such limitations, presenting a real-world case study on the provenance research of colonial cultural heritage. We present a task-aware design method for building a tool to facilitate this process. The design approach of this application is rooted in a Knowledge Discovery in Database (KDD) framework and is particularly novel due to its formalisation and operationalisation of three distinct types of semantic association: explicit, abstract, and implicit. These semantic associations, grounded in domain interpretation, are crucial for bridging data gaps where user information needs cannot be directly met by existing data. We further demonstrate how these associations can be effectively communicated through user interface components, enabling users to infer new knowledge. We evaluated the resultant application through a user study among domain experts to assess its efficacy. The evaluation confirms the effectiveness of the tool in enabling new knowledge discovery and reveals opportunities to improve the representation of the underlying data, as users could successfully infer insights even when information was missing or poorly captured in the original data sets.