Navigating Babel: A Mid-Level Ontology for Cross-Domain Cultural Heritage Discovery

The Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek (DDB) aggregates objects from libraries, archives, museums, audiovisual archives, monument conservation, and research institutions into a structurally uniform container, the Europeana Data Model (EDM), yet cross-domain discovery is structurally unsupported. Like Borges’ Library of Babel, the DDB has order without orientation. We identify three structural parallels and propose MOCHO (Mid-level Ontology for Cross-domain Cultural Heritage Objects), a reusable alignment layer between EDM and GLAM-spanning domain ontologies. mocho defines WEMI 1-typed entities and four alignment patterns.An empirical snapshot of 115k records quantifies the heterogeneity mocho addresses.