CHExGraph: A Knowledge Graph for Jagiellonian University Cultural Heritage

Abstract

Archives, libraries, and museums at universities typically operate with separate cataloguing workflows, metadata standards, and information systems, which makes it difficult to trace people, places, objects, and documents across institutional boundaries and over long historical periods. At the Jagiellonian University, cultural heritage data are distributed across the Jagiellonian Library, the University Archives, and the University Museum, each preserving different types of materials and serving distinct scholarly and public audiences. This paper introduces CHExGraph, a cultural heritage knowledge graph that integrates metadata from these three units within a shared linked data environment. CHExGraph focuses on the early history of the university (1364–1780) and unifies person-centric biographical records, bibliographic records, and object-centred descriptions. The graph adopts CIDOC-CRM as its core conceptual model and extends it to represent academic trajectories, institutional affiliations, and object-related roles. The resulting data set comprising 862,877 RDF triples was evaluated over selected competency questions. The evaluation shows that CHExGraph enables unified querying and analysis of Jagiellonian University’s distributed cultural heritage resources. CHExGraph is released with in a Zenodo repository https://zenodo.org/records/21705767. It is accompanied with documentation intended to facilitate reuse and adaptation in other digital library and cultural heritage projects.