Associations of Entity Linking Methods and Semantic Grounding with Record Integration in Cultural Heritage Archives

Abstract

The rapid digitization of cultural heritage materials has resulted in massive repositories of historical texts, yet the integration of these disparate records remains a formidable challenge due to heterogeneous metadata standards, linguistic drift, and institutional silos. This paper provides a comprehensive academic analysis of how entity linking and semantic grounding methodologies facilitate effective record integration within cultural heritage archives. By identifying named entities such as persons, locations, and events within unstructured historical texts and mapping them to standardized knowledge bases, entity linking transforms isolated documents into interconnected webs of historical data. Semantic grounding further enriches this process by assigning precise contextual meaning to these entities through established ontologies, thereby resolving historical ambiguities and orthographic variations. Through a rigorous examination of the methodological pipelines involving data preprocessing, historical named entity recognition, disambiguation, and ontology alignment, this study illustrates the transformative potential of semantic web technologies in the digital humanities sector. The analysis is supported by simulated experimental evaluations demonstrating the efficacy of context-aware disambiguation models in improving integration accuracy. The findings suggest that combining entity linking with robust semantic grounding significantly enhances archival interoperability, enabling novel pathways for historical research, public accessibility, and global cultural preservation.