A Distributed Object Repository for Cultural Heritage

This paper describes the design and the implementation of a distributed object repository that offers cultural heritage experts and practitioners a working platform to access, use, share and modify digital content. The principle of collecting paradata to document each step in a potentially long sequence of processing steps implies a number of design decisions for the data repository, which are described and explained. Furthermore, we provide a description of the concise API our implementation. Our intention is to provide an easy-to-understand recipe that may be valuable also for other data repository implementations that incorporate and operationalize the more theoretical concepts of intellectual transparency, collecting paradata, and compatibility to semantic networks.