Information technologies and cultural heritage: open systems as a reconciliation model

Abstract

Cultural information is found in different data repositories, addressing different fields and digitised in different formats. Its heterogeneous nature is a drawback for the normal user, because he needs to know and use in each case the appropriate interface to address a particular information. Our architecture intends to overcome these deficiencies by creating an interface between the user and the heterogeneous information. It is based on the development of a software architecture capable of producing a distributed virtual database of different types of digital objects associated with cultural heritage, and specifically, those from archives, libraries, museums, archaeological sites and architectural ítems. The architecture focuses on an homogeneous middleware layer capable of playing an intermediary role between the input —a distributed database— and the output –user required selection of the database content. The project will promote methods to display and retrieve the information, paying specific attention to virtual reality, and to two ways of retrieval: conventional —based on Boolean algebra— and specific —based on semantic prospects and intelligent filtering. The project will address semantic issues, classification and metadata, as a guarantee of the adequate connection and conversions between these three levels. (Author)