The Model of Collaborative Terminology Contribution to the Art & Architecture Thesaurus: Application and Improvement of Crowdsourcing Methods in an Educational Context

The paper elaborates the model of collaborative terminology contribution to the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT) through the cooperation of university teachers, students and museum professionals. The elaborated model can accelerate the otherwise time-consuming process of developing multilingual thesauri through greater student engagement while achieving multiple educational goals on real-world tasks. This model includes a statistical selection of the most frequent Croatian art and heritage domain terms and their links to relevant AAT concepts (accompanied with references to relevant literature and lexicographical sources). This process is conducted by students. Subsequent quality control methods include peer-checking and teacher supervision. Mapping of Croatian and English terms for specific concepts was further implemented through semantic technologies (SPARQL queries). Concepts that are particularly demanding are examined by scholars and museum professionals in the corresponding field. After the quality check, the terms would be included in the AAT and made available to open access as Linked Open Data (LOD), provided by the Getty Research Institute. The methods of quality control and student engagement are applied from crowdsourcing projects methodologies, but they were revised and improved concerning the specific needs and requirements of the educational context.