Enriching and Futureproofing the Databases of the Hungarian Heritage House

This working paper presents a feasibility study on enriching, semantically modelling, and future-proofing the databases of the Hungarian Heritage House (Hagyományok Háza). Building on methods developed in the OpenMusE project and the Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space, we investigate how folklore, folk-music, and narrative-heritage collections can be represented in a multilingual, interoperable knowledge-graph environment. The work is situated within the broader effort to establish a Hungarian music data sharing space, conceived as a replication and extension of the Slovak Comprehensive Music Database and the Finno-Ugric Data Sharing Space.

Two datasets—the Szekler dance-music collection and a subset of the Folk Tale Inventory—serve as pilot materials to test modelling practices, authority reconciliation, geographic gazetteers, and thesaurus alignment. We evaluate the suitability of Wikibase as a bridging layer between existing archival systems (including AtoM) and emerging European infrastructures such as the Heritage Digital Twin Ontology (HDTO) and the European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH).

Findings indicate that Wikibase enables incremental semantic enrichment, sustainable curation workflows, and cross-domain interoperability, offering a viable pathway for modernising the digital heritage ecosystem of the Hungarian Heritage House.