eCultura. Platform for Preservation and Exploitation of Cultural Content

Abstract

The eCultura project aims at developing a semantically-enriched web platform that enables cultural heritage institutions to manage and exhibit the semantics of publicly available web assets at a minimal cost and with a short investments on required software infrastructure. The platform will provide a complete set of applications and services to enhance the user experience when accessing web-based contents of the cultural domain. These services include semantic wikis, multimedia annotations, timeline presentations, interactive maps, and so on, which are deployed on a common platform. The eCultura platform is integrated by a number of open source applications grounded on a semantic web infrastructure that supports the semantic integration of all services. Semantic web technologies enable to share information among these services, as well as provide interoperability with external systems. W3C knowledge representation languages and standards are used to describe concepts of the cultural domain and provide a semantically interoperable environment. Web 2.0 techniques are used to build user communities around the shared information of cultural institutions, having the specific goal of exploiting their knowledge base in learning and educational environments. The communication among software components and applications is based on a producer/consumer model. Some services, such as wikis and blogs, work as source of information and knowledge, while other services, such as interactive maps and timeline, work as consumers to exploit the semantically enriched information. The knowledge base is stored on a shared OWL repository gathering the semantics of diverse cultural fields, including the CIDOC reference model, the FRBR ontology and the MusicOntology.