Making Persian Cultural Heritage Accessible, Interoperable, and Alive through Open Standards
A central hub for open-source projects focused on digitally preserving, enriching, and semantically linking Persian/Iranian cultural heritage.
We transform scattered GLAM resources (manuscripts, documents, photographs, archives) into FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and LOUD (Linked Open Usable Data) assets using IIIF, RDF/OWL, Linked Data, and community-driven pipelines.
All projects share these priorities:
- Semantic Depth — Rich RDF knowledge graphs aligned with CIDOC-CRM, schema.org, Getty vocabularies (AAT/TGN), LCSH, and Wikidata.
- Visual Excellence — IIIF Presentation API 3 for high-resolution, zoomable, annotatable access.
- Reunification — Virtual reconstruction of dispersed collections (e.g., Shah Tahmasp folios, Qajar documents).
- Machine + Human Usability — SPARQL-ready graphs + friendly viewers (Mirador).
- Ethical & Community-Driven — Open access, provenance respect, volunteer collaboration, Persian-language support.
- Ontology-based Approach — Ontology as an exellent roadmap.
- Persian Heritage Focus — Limited scoppe projects with integration all of them as a huge the Persian national Archive Knowledge Graph in mind.
| Project | Focus | Key Technologies | Status | Repo |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| IIIFCollection | Dynamic hierarchical IIIF catalog for Persian culture, art, architecture, books & photos | IIIF 3, JSON-LD, custom ontology, controlled vocabularies (AAT/TGN/LCSH) | Active | → |
| ghani-persian-kg | Full KG mirror of Ghassem Ghani Qajar collection (Yale) — documents, personalities, places | RDF/Turtle, scraping pipeline, SPARQL examples, IIIF placeholders | Active | → |
| Shahnama-Of-Shah-Tahmsap | RDF/OWL model of the dispersed Houghton Shahnameh (268 paintings) + genealogy | OWL 2, CIDOC-CRM, FHKB integration, IIIF manifests | Active | → |
| KG4OPennResources | TEI/XML → RDF for OPenn manuscripts (esp. Persian/Islamic) | TEI ontology, RDF, SPARQL | Active | → |
| HerzfeldDocuments | Ernst Herzfeld archival papers (archaeology, sketches, Persepolis etc.) | EAD XML → RDF, custom ontology, SPARQL | Active | → |
| ArchResources | Archival resources enrichment & modeling | RDF, archival standards | In Progress | → |
| MLDCH | Multi-Layered Aggregator — community platform for Persian GLAM harvesting | IIIF super-collections, volunteer governance, reconciliation pipelines | Framework | → |
| Orchestrating-DCHD | Orchestration pipelines using Internet Archive IIIF + metadata | IA APIs, IIIF 3.0, Colab notebooks, enrichment workflows | Active | → |
| AlbumKhaneh | Golestan Palace / historical photo albums on IA with semantic linking | IIIF collections, RDF ontology for photos, Wikidata enrichment | Active | → |
| Khaleghi_Motlagh_Shahname | Shahnameh editions & textual KG | RDF modeling | Early | → |
Experience the high-resolution, interactive IIIF collections directly in your browser (powered by Mirador 3 — the leading open-source IIIF viewer).
This hierarchical collection includes art, architecture, historical photographs, manuscripts, and more — fully enriched with controlled vocabularies and Linked Data.
- AlbumKhaneh Historical Photo Albums — Browse Golestan Palace and traveler albums on Internet Archive IIIF (see repo for individual manifests, e.g.,
https://iiif.archive.org/iiif/3/[GPAK-XXXX-XX]/manifest.json). - Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp Folios — Individual painting manifests available via Internet Archive (linked in the repo) for virtual reunification of dispersed leaves.
- Ghani Qajar Documents — IIIF placeholders and linked PDFs (expandable via the KG pipeline).
Tip: Most manifests are hosted on GitHub or Internet Archive and load instantly in Mirador, Universal Viewer, or any IIIF-compliant tool. You can also copy any manifest URL and paste it into iiif.biblissima.fr/mirador3.
- Ontologies — Reusable
mdhn:starter ontologies across repos. - IIIF Super-Collections — Hierarchical manifests hosted on GitHub + Internet Archive.
- Pipelines — Scraping → Enrichment → RDF → SPARQL.
- Vocabularies — Heavy use of AAT, TGN, LCSH, FHKB (genealogy), Wikidata reconciliation.
- Examples — Extensive SPARQL queries in most repos for personalities, places, iconography, chronology.
These projects bridge traditional heritage institutions with modern open tech, enabling:
- Researchers to run complex semantic queries.
- Educators & artists to embed high-quality IIIF viewers.
- Communities to contribute to virtual repatriation and enrichment.
Quick Start:
- Browse a project above → clone the repo.
- Load
.ttlfiles into GraphDB / Stardog / Oxigraph. - Open IIIF manifests in Mirador (see demos above).
- Run included SPARQL examples.
# Example: Explore Ghani KG
git clone https://github.com/MehranDHN/ghani-persian-kg.git
# Load data/rdf/ghani-full.ttl into your triplestore