Existing knowledge of the culture of ethnic minorities, and in particular of Jewish culture, is diverse and multi-viewpoint in essence. While some viewpoints are dominant, others are underrepresented or concealed (Kizhner et al., 2022). existing ontologies and representational approaches do not convey multiple, sometimes opposing, viewpoints. Thus, it has been recently recognized by scholars that modern knowledge organization schemes for cultural heritage should be multi-perspective and multivocal to provide useful and complete representation of knowledge for different communities of users (Hajibayova, 2018). n this study, we introduce a new paradigm for investigating minorities’ cultural heritage based on a multi-viewpoint ontology that organizes and integrates the data and conveys a diversity of external and internal views of the minority cultures. Such an ontology presents a comprehensive representation of the minority’s culture as viewed through the lens of various majority cultures and its own internal views, which in turn enables quantitative analysis of the characteristic features of the different collections and perspectives at scale.
As a use case in this study, we explore the Jewish minority cultural heritage, as ever since the Babylonian exile in the 6 th century BCE, Jewish communities have been established in numerous countries across the world. The multi-viewpoint ontology is being built from metadata of two types of online museum collections from all over the globe: large national museums and Jewish museums that reflect the external and internal views of the minority’s culture, respectively. To align various standards of tagging, indexing, and cataloguing of Jewish cultural heritage, the relevant data is automatically extracted from the selected museum databases and mapped to a unified ontological scheme based on Wikidata, existing dedicated ontologies (Winer, 2014), the diversified knowledge organization model introduced in our previous studies (Zhitomirsky-Geffet, 2019) and the automated Named Entity Recognition technique. The constructed ontology is utilized for a systematic comparative analysis of the representation characteristics (geographies, periods, types, persons, communities, languages, subjects) in different countries and for internal vs. external views. It allows us to investigate: 1) common popular representation patterns and country/perspective-specific representation patterns; and 2) inter-relationships and mutual influences between the cultures of the Jewish minority and ethnic majorities of different countries. Since the Jewish diaspora is culturally heterogeneous, as Jewish communities that settled in various regions for centuries developed their own sub-cultures, there may be multiple internal views of the minority’s culture as well. Hence, we also examine the differences and similarities between the data representation of the various Jewish museums located in different countries. In addition, each collection is evaluated in terms of the representational balance and diversity relative to the other collections, based on the distribution analysis of ontological data and the ethical evaluation framework for knowledge organization systems proposed in our previous study (Zhitomirsky-Geffet and Minster, 2022). Including various viewpoints and voices in the representation of ethnic minorities may contribute to resolving the problem of biases and underrepresentation of many aspects of minorities’ culture in museum online collections (Terras et al., 2021) and consequently lead to the creation of museums that “foster diversity and communicate ethically,” as stated in the ICOM (International Council of Museums) museum’s definition ( https://icom.museum/en/news/icom-approves-a-new-museum-definition/). The constructed ontology will be openly available online in the Judaica Europeana website and may serve as a research tool for experts in the fields of Jewish cultural heritage, history, and sociology, as well as for educational purposes and search by the general public.