ABSTRACT
The cultural heritage domain in general and silk textiles in particular, are characterized by large, rich and heterogenous data sets. Silk heritage vocabulary comes from multiple sources that have been mixed up across time and space. This has led to the use of different terminology in specialized organizations in order to describe their artifacts. This makes data interoperability between independent catalogues very difficult. Moreover, the interaction level of existing resources is low, most complex queries are not possible and results are poorly shown. In this regard, a recent EU-funded research project titled SILKNOW is building a multilingual thesaurus related to silk textiles. It is being carried out by experts in textile terminology and art historians, and computationally implemented by experts in text mining, multi-/cross-linguality and semantic extraction from text. This paper presents the rationale behind the realization of this thesaurus
